Within the Woods
by Tendo Rei
Summary: Herbert and Dan go on vacation and get detoured into a horribly familiar valley...
1. Within the Woods

Within the Woods

_Disclaimer: I don't own anything, why ya givin' me such a hard time?_

* * *

A backwoods road in Tennessee in the middle of October isn't a bad place to be, really. The air is crisp, the Spanish moss is plentiful if you're into that sort of thing, and the fog is lovely. Of course, it's much lovelier if you're safely inside a car or some other form of mobile transport, instead of experiencing all the elements firsthand. And that was what the two young men had been doing, up until a short while ago…

"I'm sorry."

"_Shutup_."

"I said I'm sorry."

"I said _shutup_."

"I'm _sorry_ Daniel!"

"Of course you're sorry. You're _always _sorry."

"I didn't mean for that to happen."

Daniel Cain turned, brows pressed together in quiet fury.

"_What the hell did you expect would happen_?"

Herbert West shrank back, shoulders hunching defensively.

"I only asked her if she wanted to see what was in the bag, I didn't think she'd _overreact-_"

"It's hardly overreacting to scream at a severed hand in a _jar_, Herbert!" Dan kicked a rock to the side and fumed. That had been humiliating, having to come up with a good excuse of _why_ they'd have such a thing in the first place and _then_ getting kicked off the bus. "We're just lucky they didn't call the cops!"

"The _police_, Dan? From a bus?"

"Shutup." Dan turned and glared in the opposite direction. If he looked at Herbert right now, he might throttle him. Sixteen hours to Nashville, and they had to take the shoelace express. With any luck, they might find another bus stop within a day's walking distance. But Dan's luck hadn't been very good since meeting up with Herbert West, who was a lighting rod for misfortune. He risked a glance at Herbert, who was sulking. Good, let him. He turned away with a _humph._

For a long time, there was nothing but the quiet scratch of their feet on the gravel and the croaking of a multitude of frogs. Then-

"Dan, I-"

"If the next words to come out of your mouth are 'I'm sorry', don't even bother."

"I wasn't going to apologize again." Herbert looked irked.

"Well _I'm _sorry, then." Dan's hackles were up. "God _forbid_ I don't accept your full pardons, oh _no._ Not Dr. West's-"

"_Shhh_!" He hissed. "Rake me over the coals _later_. Dan, I _see_ something!"

He raised his head warily. "Where?"

"Up ahead. A _light_." Dan squinted. Sure enough, a faint luminescence lay up ahead, barely a speck. He felt his heart beat faster.

"Civilization." He murmured. "Maybe a phone."

"Maybe a _car._" Herbert whispered. They exchanged looks, then broke into a run.

"No more trudging through the dark! No more stepping on barbed wire!" Dan yelled gleefully.

"Hold your tongue, Dan." Herbert puffed to keep up, but he was back in good spirits. "With our luck, it's probably a house of cannibal hillbillies waiting for some new friends to test out their chainsaws."

"Whoah, Herbert, I thought you didn't _watch_ movies." Dan teased. The prospect of mobile transport had really brightened his mood.

"I said _I don't like movies, _I never said I didn't watch-" Dan stopped short and Herbert, who had been lagging behind, ploughed into him. They both tumbled to the ground, Herbert swearing and scrabbling for his glasses. He found them and slipped them on.

"What was _that-_" he began, but Dan shushed him, pointing ahead. He followed Dan's finger to their near destination.

The light that they had followed came from a halogen lamp, mounted to a building that had probably been new when busses still ran to Innsmouth. It could be called a bus depot, if bus depots could really be that small and dangerously rickety. Herbert glanced at Dan, then heaved himself up. He adjusted his glasses, brushed himself off, and strode, businesslike, towards it.

"Sir?" He called. "Or madam? Surely your forgiveness I implore! But the fact is I was-" Dan's hand grabbed his wrist.

"Be _quiet_ Hebert!" Dan snapped. "You're going to wake someone up!"

A bit of the old Herbert showed through, his sneer dripping with contempt. "_Really_ Dan? Did my little Leatherface joke get to you? I assure you-"

"Herbert, have you seen the time?"

He was taken aback. "No."

In fact, his watch had broken in Boston, after that minor scuffle with the basketball player Dan had ended up sorting out. It was stuck at 3:48 until he got it fixed or got a new watch. Dan showed the plastic face of his.

"It's past two. Whoever runs this place, if anyone does, is not going to be expecting passengers this late. Or _ever_, maybe. That person might be frightened by loud shouting. They might not understand that we're just lost and looking for a bus. They might be _armed._"

Herbert blinked. "Really, Dan?"

"Yes. Out here in the country, it'd be odd for someone _not_ to carry some form of protection. Let's just go in, make ourselves comfortable, and wait for morning."

"Yes, but what makes you think they'll be any less inclined to shoot us in broad daylight?"

"That's a chance I'm willing to take. Come on."

* * *

They trudged to the building. The second Dan turned the knob, it broke off in his hand. The door swung open on its own, revealing a centipede-infested nightmare. The phrase "make themselves comfortable" was going to be hard to put into practice. Dan had been in worse places of course, he **was** a medical student, but he couldn't remember one that had given him the willies more.

Herbert edged in beside Dan when he showed no signs of stepping further into the decay. He wrinkled his nose and poked a seat cushion, which disintegrated at his touch. Dan recovered enough to move and flicked a light switch. Wires sparked dangerously at once, and he quickly flicked it off again. Surveying the place where they would spend the next few hours, Herbert summed up their situation nicely in one example of biting irony.

"Nice." He said. Dan made a beeline for the bulletin board, mouth moving soundlessly as he read the bus schedules.

"Okayyyy, the next bus comes at around…11:30?" He ground his teeth together. "I guess it'll have to do."

Herbert maneuvered himself next to Dan and squinted at the board.

"Dan, this hasn't been up to date since September 1st …_five years ago_!"

"Well, then, we'll just have to wait until a bus _does_ come, won't we?"

"But Dan-"

"I don't care, Herbert, I'm not walking down these creepy backwoods roads anymore, not for you." He slapped the bulletin board, sending dust and god-knows-what-else raining down. "Let's just sit down and have a nice nap, shall we?"

The benches weren't comfortable by any stretch of the imagination, and Herbert's suggestion to pad them with newspapers didn't really help. The place was bitterly cold and a little damp, but neither could be persuaded to go out for firewood. The fireplace didn't look as if it had been used in a long time, anyway; and by the distinctive squeaking noises Herbert perceived were coming from the chimney itself, there was probably a nest in the flue.

They both stretched out on the benches, pretending to be comfortable. Dan stared into the empty fireplace, wondering not for the first time what life would've been like if he hadn't accepted Herbert's money or his partnership. If he had stayed home and had a nice, cozy life, a small practice of his own, Meg-

"Dan?"

His neck immediately tightened. _God,_ that wheedling tone. It was like traveling with a three-year-old, only you could give them a toy or a book or a juicebox to distract them from their neediness. With Herbert it never stopped. He let it drift into silence for a few moment before deciding it was a little too cruel to leave Herbert dangling like this.

"_What_, Herbert?"

"Are we friends?"

Oh no. Not **this** again.

"Why do you ask that?"

"Never mind _why_, are we friends?"

_Christ_. Dan could never figure out why someone as devastatingly smart as Herbert needed constant reassurance, perhaps something to do with his starved-for-affection childhood. Funny, but he couldn't picture him as a child in any way, shape, or form.

"Like you always say, Herbert, we are partners, we are associates, we are the fathers of a new medical renaissance." There.

"But…are we _friends?_" Dan sighed. He could barely envision making it through the next ten minutes with Herbert, let alone the entire night. He decided to be blunt.

"No."

"_Why?_"

Screw philosophical discourse. "Because I hate you."

"Oh, _Dan_." Herbert hugged his worn-out jacket to himself, exasperated. "This isn't the time for jokes."

"_Who's joking?_"

A resentful silence lay between them like thick, bad blood.

Finally, Herbert broke it.

"It's not my fault-"

"-That Meg is dead. Right, right. Doesn't it ever occur to you that we've had the same argument over and over for the past few years? You start out trying to cajole me into liking you, I remind you _why_ I don't like you, you try to guilt me into agreeing, I make an appeal to your better nature, et cetera, et cetera. We can't _win_ an argument like that, neither of us. Does it ever get boring to you? It does to me."

Herbert nursed his hurt. "I didn't know I _bored_ you Dan."

"Oh great, now we're to the next leg of the conversation, you trying to play the victim. '_Oooh, look at _me_, I'm Herbert West and I have no social skills_, wah, wah, wah, wah…"

"I _never_ say that!" West snapped, hands curling into fists. "Anyway, who's' being juvenile here? _Not me!_"

"I never _said_ you were juvenile, I just meant- oh, _forget_ it! Everything I say, you twist my words to make it seem like _I'm_ the bad guy."

"Funny, _I_ was just about to say the same."

Both sat on the benches, stewing. Dan was angry at being roped into yet another argument, while Herbert was just plain pissed at Dan calling him a child. _Just where did he get off calling Herbert-_

Dan sighed deeply and stood up. "I'm going."

Herbert's dark mood immediately fell away, the stifling, grasping neediness roaring back. "What?"

Dan zipped up his coat and stuck his hands into his pockets. "I'm _leaving_ West."

Herbert panicked, losing his tongue and then finding it again. "_Where_? Where can you go, there' nothing for _miles-_"

Dan sighed again. "I didn't mean like _that_, I mean I'm going to go for a walk. I'm gonna find the bathroom, maybe scrounge up some food."

Herbert sat, very small and alone on the bench. "Can I come with you?"

Dan shook his head. "No, stay here. In case anything happens to one of us, I want the other one to be okay. Okay?"

Herbert stared at the floor, a tangle of emotions on his face. Dan walked away; not wanting to seem so distant he gave Herbert's shoulder a squeeze before he left.

"I'll be back." He called over his shoulder.

"_I hope so._" Came Herbert's morose reply. Dan shook his head again, smiling. It _was_ hard to hate him, it really was.

* * *

_Many miles away, something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark, shadowy swamp… "crawls" isn't such a great description, I guess. "Rose" or "ascended" might be better, but only just. You see, "crawling" implies limbs of some sort. This thing hadn't any. It had a body, sure, a body as big and about as substantial as the wind. It could see, if you call that seeing, and as it recovered from yet another day resting in the mud it saw three things._

_The being that had been bothering it much lately. It jogged along at a reasonable pace, burdened by the heavy metal object it carried._

_And something else. Two new beings, those strange upright creatures that tended to wander into this place unaware of its presence. Those two it would go after. Leave the other for later. It was fairly close to the others, though. If it wasn't careful, it might be deprived of yet another host. It pulled itself together and crept from the swamp._

* * *

Dan shut the screen door firmly behind him, his breath visible. A fire really _would_ be nice, maybe after a pit stop he could look for wood. He made a complete circle around the building before spying a small leaning shack with that unmistakable sickle moon on the door. He crossed his fingers as he opened it. Surprisingly, it was much nicer on the inside than the depot itself. But perhaps that was because this one got more traffic, so to speak.

He sat down, had a flash of insight, and looked for toilet paper. He found a paperback horror book, the kind they sold at airports, with half the pages missing. He put two and two together and sighed, ripping out about three.

* * *

_The thing picked up speed, ploughing through trees and skipping over puddles._

* * *

Herbert huddled on his bench, breath coming in great clouds, feeling very sorry for himself. He hated when the conversation turned to Meg, as it inorexably did, because that immediately meant he was going to lose the argument. No matter what he did, Daniel was never going to let him forget Meg's death. But really, it hadn't been _his _fault directly! Was Mathiu Orfila to be blamed for all the new and complex poisons people invented to avoid detection by arsenic? Were the Curies for the many deaths by radiation poisoning? True, he _had_ somewhat involved her by reanimating her father, but that didn't mean he was…

What was that noise?

* * *

_It hurtled over a few hills, ever accelerating. The other being was moving too. In its long internment in this valley, the other had learned to sense it, meaning it could no longer be taken unawares. Usually it stayed in the crude shelter it had devised, waiting for the brute force of the thing crashing against the shelter to subside. It left the shelter every day to forage, sleeping only at dawn and dusk. _

_The one comfort the thing had was that while it was confined to the valley itself, so was the other. The valley, small enough to be hidden in the great wilderness, was large enough so one could not traverse it within a day. Not on foot._

_The other was running now._

* * *

Dan sat, reading the torn pages of the novel in his hand by the light coming through the hole in the door. It wasn't too bad, something about an ancestral horror in an ancient New England manse. They always seemed to take place in New England, for some reason he could never fathom. He was just to the paragraph where the heroine was exploring the drafty old house in her filmy nighty, a very descriptive passage, when he heard it. It was too faint to make out clearly, but it sounded…metallic. He tried to finish up quickly and get his ass back indoors.

* * *

_It was one hillside away, now, the building lay before it. A road, one it had never seen before, lay behind the building. The other's form stood out in sharp relief, anxiety and terror picking out its shape in the air. Apparently it was heading for the building as well. The sight of the building flashed once more before it was lost in the trees, the thing moving again._

* * *

Herbert crouched low by the door, head pressed to the wall. It was a sort of knocking sound, along with a definite metallic tang. He could make out more, too, the closer it came to him. The occasional thud as something heavy crashed against a tree. A labored wheeze, cloth scraping together at a very fast rate. It sounded like someone running for their life through the woods.

He rummaged in his black bag and brought out a scalpel, silver and sharp. He carefully rose to a standing position, hand closed tightly around it. If whoever it was came through the back door, he would have a little surprise for them.

* * *

_It crashed through trees, over rocks, closer, always closer…_

* * *

The thumping got louder now, the gasping more frequent and pained-sounding. He held his body tense for a moment before realizing that the sound wasn't getting closer, it was going off to the side…

He risked a look out the window. That was how he saw it.

Something, like a giant invisible hand, was crushing its was through the woods, leaving broken trees in its wake. Herbert froze for a moment, his mouth open. The walking dead was one thing, but _this_-

* * *

_It was nearly there, nearly there. There was a leathery roar as it tore the air around it, going so fast it could no longer really control itself. Trees crashed to the ground, boulders exploded at its drunken frenzy to get to the shack._

* * *

Dan had heard the footfalls trail off as he fumbled in the dark with the catch on his jeans. Now a worse sound, like many voices at once, all shrieking. He had no thoughts anymore, just a burning determination to get back inside before whatever was coming hit. He put his hand on the outhouse latch.

Silence.

It was like turning off a faucet, all the noise suddenly stopped. He paused with his hand on the door, before cautiously turning it and peeking out.

"Hey now," he said, and the world was torn apart.

Herbert was thrown back through the wall of the shack, his scalpel embedding itself harmlessly in the floor. He flew through the air a couple of yards before coming into contact with solid timber with a sick thud. The shack rained down around him and the body he had landed next to.

* * *

_In its zeal, it had completely obliterated the shack. Perhaps the others were dead. It had no time for this. The thing retreated, pulling its body back the way it came. It saw a light on the other end of the valley and went for that instead, restraining itself…_

Later, dawn broke upon the world.

* * *

_Author's note: yes, that's a cliffhanger, you saw right. This is a crossover, and if it's not readily apparent what I'm crossing over with, it will be soon enough. You may noticed I snitched part of "The Raven" early on, I just can't help making at least one Poe reference per story. I'll try and stop, but I can't promise anything. XD_


	2. From Beneath the Roots

**From Beneath the Roots**

* * *

Herbert West woke up laying against something softer than rock, for which he was only marginally grateful. His mouth tasted of old blood, one of his teeth cracked neatly in the middle. His head was intact, despite what his pain receptors told him, the hair matted and sticky with what he hoped was _his_ blood. He cautiously opened one eye, wary of airborne detritus.

The world that met his eyes was a blurry apocalypse, the breath caught in his chest before he realized what the problem was. The familiar weight was gone from the bridge of his nose, there was only a painful scrape where his glasses had been. His right hand instinctively fumbled for the top of his head, finding only greasy hair and sharp chunks of wood. Panic now began to set in; Herbert could asses any and all damage to his body and deal with it, but losing his glasses left him crippled, stranded. Fighting down terror, his hands crawled off in opposite directions, patting and fumbling for his trademark plastic frames. He found more wood slivers, bits of brick, a human foot(best not to think of that now), and a remnant of the hand-jar. He cut himself and swore softly, gripping his injured hand.

Wherever his glasses were, they were out of arm's length, and quite probably broken. He fought off another wave of panic at that thought. Herbert rose carefully, his head staying with the surface of his headrest for a moment before coming painfully unstuck. He shuffled, arms out like a blind man without a cane, squinting furiously at the ground. Wonder of wonders, at about his tenth step away from the body, he felt something small and fragile beneath his foot. Hoping fervently that he hadn't crushed anything, he bent down and carefully extracted them from their grave of moldy leaves.

He quickly brushed them off, the sound of his pillow stirring put some urgency into his steps. He slipped them on, and could see…just barely. The left lens was scratched to near-opacity and a large crack ran through the other. Still, it was something. He gave his body the quick once-over pat as the man behind him sat up noisily, with various groans and cracks.

Herbert found he was more or less fine, ribs a bit bruised and a mild concussion, but he would live. His companion lurched to his feet as he took out a small blister pack of aspirin, popping a few into his mouth.

"Well Dan, we lived through the night, although I'm not sure that's exactly what you had in mind-"

"Dan?" Came an unfamiliar male voice. "Who's Dan?"

And icy trickle ran down Herbert's back, and he turned slowly, braced for assault. The man behind him looking quizzically at their surroundings was not Daniel Cain, though they had the same dark good looks. This one had a smugness about him that Hebert didn't like, though, and his chin was far more prodigious. Also, he seemed to be missing a hand.

Herbert straightened up. "And just _who _are _you_?"

The other man looked at him, eyebrows furrowed. The stump where his hand had been was poorly bandaged, there was duct tape holding the gauze in place. A small scar on his jaw.

"I'm the guy you landed on. Now answer me, who's Dan? Is he your buddy?"

Herbert, remembering last night's conversation, hunched his shoulders and sulked.

"No." He murmured like a cross eight-year-old. "He's…he's the man I was traveling with."

"Oh." The other man looked a little perplexed at Herbert's reaction. "Well, he's probably dead."

Herbert bristled, hands forming fists, but then looked behind him. The shack was completely destroyed. He was lucky to be alive. Even he knew that, and he didn't believe in luck.

"What's your name?"

"Hmm?" Herbert jerked out of his reverie. The other man was searching for something on the ground, his one hand rooting through debris.

"What's your name?

"…Herbert." He said warily. "Herbert West."

"Okay then Herbie, can you help me find my boomstick?"

"_What_?"

"My _shotgun._"

"Oh." Herbert said, extremely irritated by the other's casual butchering of his first name. They shifted piles of toothpicks, the boards of the shack had been splintered on impact and there was no piece of wood larger than Herbert's hand, but it was still tough going. Finally they found it wedged in the branches of a tree, which the man studied warily for a moment before climbing.

Glasses found, shotgun rescued from the landscape, they were now in a state where they could really size each other up. Herbert viewed the other man with curiosity, wondering how he managed to fire the gun that now rested against his shoulder. The other man looked at him with detached pity, apathy etched in every line on his face.

"So.." Herbert began. "Strange place to wake up in."

The other man shrugged. "I've woken up weirder places."

Herbert did like the sound of that.

"What's _your_ name?"

The man stretched a bit before answering.

"Name's Ash."

* * *

When Dan woke up, he wasn't quite sure he had opened his eyes at all. His head was foggy and it was absolutely dark. Then, his eyes adjusted and he wasn't quite sure if he was alive. There was a pair of legs he thought must belong to him, a theory supported by the fact that he could no longer feel most of his body. But after he rolled over blood rushed back into his extremities, giving a painful needles-and-pins flavor to the next few minutes. He was in a pit of some kind, from what he could see, and it was getting dark. The legs in front of him, upon closer inspection, belonged to a man much shorter and hairier than he. Dan felt relief for a full second before realizing he was trapped in a pit with a pair of severed legs.

He tried standing and his right leg crumpled beneath him, sending him jarringly back to the floor. After testing it with his hands, he found a painful swelling on his shin. It could be a hairline fracture, or a full-blown break, but the bottom line was that he wasn't going anywhere for a while.

It was cold in here. Grubs and various insects busied themselves on the walls. He could not envision spending an enjoyable night here, but saw no way to heave himself out of here without further injury to his leg.

He thought of making a splint, and then of Herbert, who had always been better at battlefield medicine. He had been in the building, maybe hit by the brunt of the blast, whatever it was. Even the great Herbert West, despite what he might think to the contrary, was only human. He sighed and began to improvise a field dressing.

* * *

"Ash what?"

They were picking their was along a thin trail, Herbert's shamble matching Ash's tender-footed gait. His shoes had blown off in the explosion, apparently.

"Ash nothing. Look, would you try to stay on _your_ side Herbie?"

"I'm giving you all the room I can, _Ash Nothing,_ and my name isn't _Herbie_."

"Look, I'm sorry about the nickname, but I hate having to say _Herbert_ every time I want to talk to you."

"If you were really sorry, you'd tell me _your_ name so I could make up a nickname for you. Ash is so _formal_, don't you think?" Herbert snapped pettishly. Ash sighed. They walked on in silence.

"It's Ashley." He said finally. "Ashley Williams." He looked at Herbert defiantly.

Herbert stared back, unmoved.

"…Well?"

"Well what?"

"No jibes? No comebacks?"

"Don't flatter yourself."

"Hey come on, even _I_ admit that Ashley is a girl's name. Aren't you going to have at it?"

"You're talking to a man who had to go through elementary school with the name _Herbert_. No, I have nothing to add to your name, Ash." Herbert stated impassively.

Ash watched him for a few moments, before a slow smile spread on his face.

"Thanks. If it bugs you, I'll shorten it to Herb."

"I've got nothing against that."

They walked on in silence for a few moments, before Ash broke out in snickers. Herbert cast a cold eye on him. "What?"

"It's our names: Ash and Herb. We sound like the title of a Cream album."

Herbert was silent for a few beats, warming slightly to the joke.

"Yes." He began slowly. "Or the name of a bad After-school special."

Ash went into guffaws at this. "'Ash & Herb: _seasoning for danger'_."

They both chuckled for a few minutes and lapsed into silence again. Light was fading around them.

In this sheltered little valley at this time of year, daylight lasted only a few hours, shadows from the surrounding hills blotting out the light at around three p.m. They had slept through most of the day, and Ash said it was of the utmost importance that they get to shelter somewhere before nightfall. You couldn't be safe in these woods.

* * *

On the lip of a pit somewhere in the forest floor, an elbow heaved over the side, gripping a gnarled root for balance. The other one hove into view, then a face that was going white with agony. Dan managed to drag his body out of the pit before his shoulder gave out again, his right leg radiating pain. He lay there, winded, for a long time.

The valley was in shadow, and the mist beginning to pour thickly through the trees.

Dan had made a crude splint out of sticks and tough roots, bloodying his hands, but it wouldn't hold up to just regular walking. He sat up stiffly and began looking for a good-sized stick.

* * *

"So tell me, Ash, how long have you lived here?"

"Hard to remember. I don't keep a calendar. It can't be more than a year or two…" He trailed off, uncertain.

"A year or two? So…you wouldn't…happened to have seen…"

"You saw it, didn't you?"

Herbert turned to him, puzzled. "Saw what?"

"The _trees_. You must've seen what they did before the shack went _blooie_. They always do that when It moves."

Herbert didn't like the sound of that It.

"I saw _something_-"

"Look, you don't have to pretend with me, okay? I believe you. I've lived here for long enough to have seen what lives in this valley."

"Oh." Herbert said. "Do you know what It _is_ then?"

Ash stopped, running a hand through his hair and sighing. "Barely. Something to do with an old book in a cabin. It can't have been that long ago, but it all seems so far away. My…my friends…we all came here to stay for a few days…and…"

"They were killed?"

Ash gave a short, bitter laugh. "I wish." He noticed Herbert's scandalized look. "Trust me, dead would've been better."

"Better than what?

"What actually _did_ happen to them."

* * *

Dan hobbled painfully. Each accidental touch of his foot on the ground sent fresh spikes of agony up his leg. The improvised crutch was not very sturdy, he had to be careful not to lean the whole of his weight on it. It wouldn't be so bad, but it was so bitingly _cold. _He had to find shelter, or even matches soon.

Fortune seemed to be smiling on Daniel Cain, however, because before him the trees eventually parted and showed a most welcome sight. A cabin, with lights in the windows. He nearly sobbed with relief. He stepped up his hobbling, no longer afraid of overburdening his crutch. He would crawl if he had to, if it meant getting out of the cold. He was so deliriously happy, he didn't notice the odd damage to the house, half the windows broken and a door smashed in.

* * *

"That thing was called up by the book, and now it lives here. But I don't think it can leave the valley."

"Why not?"

They were seated on rocks, snacking on some of Ash's provisions. Herbert didn't normally go for jerky and GORP, but he was famished and needed to get his strength back.

"Well, it's hard to say. I think, and this is just _my_ theory, that it needs people to really move around. I mean, that thing can _move_ but it can't really _go_ anywhere. Trouble is... every time it…_**gets** _someone, they don't have a very long shelf life, if you get my drift."

"_Gets_ someone?" Herbert looked irritated. "You're being evasive again. What does 'getting' entail? Why would death be better? What-"

"Okay, okay, I get the point. When it _gets_ people, it…umm…what do you know about possession?"

"You expect me to believe your friends were possessed by a supernatural being? What kind of **un**scientific super**stition**-" Herbert spat the words like a curse.

"You _saw_ what it did to the trees, Herb, don't tell me you can't imagine what else that thing is capable of?"

Herbert sniffed and took a bite of granola. "What I saw was a perfectly explicable natural phenomena. Hurricane-force winds-"

"-do not travel in a _line_ like that, Herb. And they don't just destroy a building without touching the trees around it. Did you notice that? How we got pummeled but the friggin _trees_ barely dropped a leaf?"

He _had_, but hadn't really thought about it at the time.

"That thing…the trees are on its side. My sister Cheryl was out walking when…I built my shelter in the rocks, nothing wooden. I've kept safe all this time, only going out in the daytime. It doesn't really like sunlight." Ash was reminiscing, staring off into the distance. Herbert, uncomfortable, broke the silence.

"Where do you get your food, then?"

Ash snapped out of his trance. "Oh…I get it from the campers. The rest I forage."

"The campers? I don't understand."

"Well, we weren't the only dumb college kids to come here. Sometimes I find them in time to warn them, but they never listen. Then It comes and…well, the chainsaw."

Herbert's mouth fell open, his half-masticated jerky littering his already filthy shirt. The bag dropped from his limp grasp.

"You…you kill people…and _rob_ their corpses?"

"No! It's not like that-"

"It's _exactly_ like that!"

* * *

Dan shouldered the broken screen aside. The place was warm, if a little bare, and there was a fire in the fireplace. He felt the anxiety melting from his bones.

"Hello? A warm, liquid voice called. "Who's there?"

Dan was a little wary of scaring whoever it was in his bloodied and bruised state, so he tried to sound pitiful. It wasn't hard.

"Hello, um, hi. I was in an accident and I'm lost, do you think you could help me out? I can't walk anymore."

The owner of the voice appeared in the doorway, and Dan snapped to attention. A very pretty girl wearing a long sweatshirt that came to her hips and nothing else, she had a very nice smile. There was something…off, though.

"Aren't you cold?" She asked.

"I was just going to ask you the same thing?"

She laughed and _oh_, did he love that laugh. It bubbled up from her toes and turned to honey as it went through her throat. He unconsciously relaxed.

"Trust me, when you've got a blazing fire going, you don't need that much. Here, let me help you sit down."

She came over an took his elbow and she was warm, even through the fabric. She helped maneuver him to a settee, which he flopped onto gratefully. She fetched him an old horsehair blanket and he curled up under it, dangerously close to falling asleep.

"You're very, very kind." He told her sincerely.

She smiled as an answer, tossing some hair over her shoulder. He could see up her shirt a little.

"But tell me, aren't you afraid? A little cabin in the middle of nowhere, alone with a strange man?"

She smiled, and it was all teeth. "You don't frighten me. I've seen stranger men than **you**."

* * *

"Herbert, just listen to me-"

"The hell I will!"

"Herbie, just-"

"_Don't call me Herbie!_"

Herbert West stood on the highest boulder he could find, brandishing a piece of wood. His traveling companion was a murderer and a grave-robber. True, he himself was guilty on both parts as well, but that had been in the name of science! He wasn't some two-bit psychopath with delusions of being trapped in a valley by some vague, threatening force!

Ash stood before him, hands open as a gesture of peace.

"Look, Herb, if you would only listen-"

"Listen to _what_? The deranged ramblings of a psychotic killer? Texas Chainsaw Massacre was right, you _are_ all dangerous lunatics!"

"Hey _come on, __**I'm not even from here!**_" Ash snapped. Herbert waved his bludgeon again.

"_Stay away!_" He practically shrieked. He was answered with a similarly-pitched noise.

They both looked into the woods, quarrel temporarily forgotten. Ash cupped his hands behind his ears, eyes closed. They snapped open again.

"That sound came from over _there_," He pointed to the woods behind them. "It's probably a campsite, come on!"

Herbert looked at him with disdain. "Do you really think I'd follow _you_ into the woods, just because-"

"Shut up and let's go! They might still be alive!" Before he could protest, Ash caught him by the elbow and dragged him along.

Herbert tried to wrench his arm from the other's grasp, but Ash was in far better shape than he. It was a struggle just to keep up with his lanky stride. Finally the woods opened up onto a scene of all sorts of horrors.

It had been a couple of guys, cheap dome-style tents in a circle around a campfire pit. Sports utility vehicles and brand new pickups circles the tents. One of the cars was open, disgorging the contents of its engine onto the ground. The guys themselves were scattered around the camp, in various states of disrepair. Herbert saw one unlucky soul whose upper half was hanging from a tree, legs and pelvis nowhere to be seen.

"How do you think…" He trailed off, unsure of how to phrase the question.

"Slingshot. Two grabbed him." He pointed to the trees and made a stretching motion with his hands. "Probably sailed off somewhere."

"Oh." He said in a small voice. He looked around the camp.

"Still think I did it?"

Herbert was considering a corpse missing an arm, businesslike. "No."

"Really? That's-"

"Look at the lesions on this torso, the _stress_ these bodies must've undergone…"

Ash looked at Herbert uncertainly, like many who saw this side of him for the first time. "What?

"Something very large crushed this one, he's practically jelly. And yet there's no signs of struggle, it happened too fast for him to even react."

"Look, just a minute ago you were threatening to brain me because I was a chainsaw murderer. Now you're looking at dead guys who've had their bodies stomped on like grapes and you're perfectly fine!"

"I was only concerned with your mental state. I don't travel with murderers, Ash." Herbert said, prodding an eyeball.

"Well, good-"

"They make things far too messy."

Silence. Far away, a tree creaked.

"You're not telling me everything about yourself, are you?" He said to Herbert.

West straightened up and brushed himself off. "Not at all. I merely told you what you needed to know, no more, no less."

"But-"

"There are many things you don't need to know about my past, just as there are many things in yours that I do not care to know."

"But I'd _lik­e-_"

"Let's just keep this on a professional basis, shall we?"

A body behind him twitched.

"But Herbert-"

"Ashley, I've already made my-"

"Get _down_!" he unslung his rifle and flip-cocked it, steadying it with his stump arm. Herbert hit the deck rather quickly as the man behind him rose up. The gun kicked once and he heard a sound like a stuck pig squealing. He looked behind him and wished he hadn't.

Herbert was used to various stages of decay, he had tested his theorem on cadavers nearly liquid, but this thing wasn't rotten. It was…what were the words for it? The eyes were white in the face, which had now before a nightmare of jellied blood and something green. It made a continuous noise like fork tines shrieking on a plate that turned Herbert's spine to glass and made him grit his teeth.

The gun kicked again, but the thing barely flinched. Herbert ducked behind a rock as Ash fumbled for ammunition. He rooted through his pockets, then looked up to find the thing inches from his face, growling at him.

"Ohhhhh _shit._" He muttered. The thing tossed him like a rag doll into one of the tents.

Ash rolled around in pain, badly winded. He heard its heavy steps as it lumbered over to him, preparing to do a repeat performance, and covered his head. Then he heard a loud crack and looked up.

Herbert stood there like some warped guardian angel, a car battery clutched in his hands. He had picked up the heaviest thing handy.

The thing screeched and went for him but Herbert was relentless, bashing it in the head again and again, battering it on its feet until it went over backwards. He stood on its legs, breathing heavily, eyes blazing. Ash didn't know whether to feel grateful or frightened.

He stood up, wincing. Not too bad. He'd been thrown into harder things.

Herbert dangled the battery in one hand while the other smoothed his hair and straightened his glasses.

"Is it dead?"

Ash shook his head. "Only one way to kill these things."

"Dismemberment?"

He looked at Herbert in disbelief. "How do you know?"

"It stands to reason." He said calmly, dropping his improvised weapon. He looked around the camp.

"I usually use my chainsaw to take them apart, but it ran out of gas. I left it at my shelter." Ash said.

"Well then, let's see what they have here, shall we?"

They found an abundance of hunting knives(too messy) and a bread knife(too dull). They found a splitting maul, the head snapped off at the handle. Finally, they found the hatchet.

Ash looked at it doubtfully. "Will it be enough?"

They both looked over at the corpse, squirming under the large rocks they weighted it down with.

Herbert gave a sigh of resignation. "It'll have to be."

* * *

Later, they sat glumly on the bed of one of the trucks, chins in hand.

"I hate myself for saying this, but I want to check the whole site to see if they had anything useful, like a radio or something."

"I think it'd also be prudent to burn the bodies."

Ash heaved a mighty sigh. "You know what this means, don't you?"

"That practical people see the logical side of any situation?"

"Yeah, that." Ash said glumly. "And that we're both ghouls."

The trees around were quiet.

On his couch a mile or two away, Dan stirred in his sleep, dreaming of Meg.

* * *

_Author's note: yeah, I'm crossing over with **Evil** **Dead**. Oh yeah. I went there. Sorry for the grisly bits in this and probably all chapters to come, but what's a zombie flick without a little gore, huh? I like how Ash and Herbert seem to get along without realizing it, I think they're both kind of veterans of the same situation. Though West **does** make his own demons...I'm going to have to work that in somewhere near the finale. Be seeing you!_


	3. Charnel Clay

**

* * *

Charnel Clay**

* * *

Some days start out with you knowing everything is going to go your way. Animals will fawn over you, loose change will show up on the sidewalk, you'll find lost socks in places you've looked millions of times before. It's an ancient human instinct that can assess the overall tone of a day by its first few moments.

It was still night, but it was technically tomorrow as Herbert West sat in glum calculation of the previous day's events. Odds were, he reckoned, that owing to the statistical impossibility of yesterday, where everything that he didn't even know _could_ go wrong indeed went wrong, that the new day was not going to be a change-on-the-sidewalk day. In fact, it was going to suck outright. He might even die, but then again, that might be a mercy.

Such thoughts were keeping him wide awake, as he meant them to. The man by his side slumbered on fitfully; while _he_ had been given the first watch. Except for the man beside him it was uneventful. Ash was a very uneasy sleeper, muttering and twitching in his REM state.

Ash was a veteran of these conditions, his rules were only those of haste. Grab sleep in the quiet times, eat quickly and ravenously because you don't know when you'll eat again, and never go back for a fallen comrade. You don't know who they'll be when you get to them.

He stretched out in their makeshift tent, chewing languidly on some dehydrated soy lumps™(now in barbeque flavor!). They had constructed it out of some of the tent poles and the tarp with the least blood on it, clumsily made so it looked like it had just blown over. If the spot didn't looked lived in, Ash reasoned, It might not approach the area. Ash was just full to the brim with wisdom.

Herbert rolled over to his side and looked out on the woods, contemplating. A quiet susurrus came from Ash's hated trees, and they moved though there was no breeze. If Dan hadn't died in the explosion, he might be dead anyway. The man he had known longer than anyone, closer to him even than Herr Gruber, his own mentor, was gone. Herbert felt a strange cold emptiness that had nothing to do with fear or hunger. It would remain in his stomach, a bottomless void no food would ever fill, gnawing at him for the rest of his days.

He would have to get used to being alone again, to perpetually looking over his shoulder for the walking undead. Perhaps Mr. Williams would give him a few pointers.

He slipped off his glasses and put his face in his arms. Losing Dan hurt, he admitted that, but what really hurt was the fact that he couldn't even see the body. Not to give it any sort of funerary rites, don't be ridiculous, but he felt that Dan's last wishes would've been for his death to not have been in vain, for Herbert to make the most of his body.

That was Herbert's take on it, anyway.

He curled up next to Ash, not touching but close enough to feel the warmth from his body, and without meaning to he drifted off into sleep.

* * *

Dan woke up.

There was no transition, one minute he was unconscious, the next everything was sharp and clear and his head _hurt_.

The blanket over him was stiff in places. He panicked at first, thinking he had bled more in his sleep but upon further examination he found that most of the spots were stiff and flaky and nearly black with age. How had he not seen that last night? He tried to sit up and winced, back spasming painfully. The blanket slid to the floor, the sudden cold both invigorating and painful. He could tell how bad he was hurt and where, it was like there was a map in glowing red of all the injuries on his body.

His shoulder was wrenched, his ankle was turned, his head was splitting open, his shin was fractured, his hands felt like paraffin, and he tasted copper. But on the plus side, he had to go to the bathroom _really_ bad…

…oh wait, did I say _plus_ side?

He ground his teeth together and called for his hostess. Three things made his summons die in his throat. One was the fact that he, Daniel Cain, had been in very damp and cold conditions since yesterday, and his throat just wasn't up to the strain. The second was the sad truth that he had not bothered to learn her name before passing out. The third was that the young woman herself was crouched in a small patch of moonlight on the cabin floor, back to him.

Dan tried for several minutes to put his fingers on exactly _what_ disturbed him about his hostess's appearance; perhaps it was the fact that she was just sort of resting there in the corner in the middle of the night for some reason he didn't want to guess, or maybe the fact that her sides did not move in and out to indicate breathing. Or perhaps it was the way she perched on the very tips of her toes, very still, not even needing to balance.

No, he decided. It was her neck. Her neck that hung at a wrong angle to her body.

Her neck that was a very vivid purple.

He tried to get up with the least amount of noise possible, which we all know was an exercise in futility, don't we? Yet, miracle of miracles, she didn't even flinch. He shuddered, bracing himself on the coffee table. If he ever made it out of here, which was looking to be less likely all the time, he was never going to go anywhere again to escape his troubles. Sure, a small militia of the walking deceased hounded his footsteps in Dunnwich, and he was facing several criminal negligence charges in good old Miskatonic Valley, but it was _home_. There, you _knew_ where the ghouls came from. You made them yourself.

Here? You couldn't even tell who the real humans were!

He grasped desperately for his crutch, which lay thankfully unbroken by the back door. He heard a creak behind him and looked to see if the young woman had moved.

There was no one there.

Suddenly, his whole vision was filled to the periphery with a screaming night terror, some kind of primeval horror left over from when strange low creatures called man made crude implements out of bone and dark, unknowable things ruled the seas. Dan fought involuntary evacuation of his bowels and screamed. The thing screamed back at him in a voice that was familiar, and why shouldn't it be? He had heard it earlier, laced with warmth and honey and making every comment sound like an invitation to bed.

"_Joooooiiiiinn ussssssss._" It shrieked, tearing at his hair. It had a pencil in its hand and made to jab it into Dan's throat. Dan, acting on instincts honed by years of service to Miskatonic's modern-day Prometheus, thrust the business end of his makeshift crutch upwards. Luckily, it was roughly fashioned and the splintery point hit a soft spot. Dan was rewarded with a shower of gore and decided to give up his prize for what was behind door number 2.

He tumbled headlong out the screen door, lights flashing behind his eyes when he landed on his wrong leg. He managed to heave himself up in time so that the she-demon bit the dirt not a hand span from where he had been. He hastily used his crutch as a cudgel; in his injured and frantic state he barely made one hit out of three. Besides, the she-demon had the strength and agility of at least _three_ speed freaks. She raked at his right leg with razor claws, catching his cuff and nothing more because he was rearing it back. With a sickening _crunch_ his kick sent her head backward, while he ended up on the ground clutching his injured leg and howling in pain.

He heard her get up again and lost all hope, because he had just lost whatever chance he had at a getaway. In his desperation, he grabbed for the nearest thing, a wooden handle of something that felt oddly solid in his hands. It made him feel a bit better.

As she came shrieking at him again, he hefted the object in his hands and swung it down, burying the head of a very rusty old axe into her skull. White leaked out. Dan didn't know if he was going to vomit or pass out.

His crutch had finally split, just too poorly made to stand up to much pressure. He cast about for any sturdy sticks or vines but saw only twigs. His eye passed over the axe and he evaluated it, finally sighing and bracing the thing's shoulder with his slightly less bad leg and trying to coax the axe out. It was tough going, and slippery _and_ downright unpleasant, but after a few minute's heaving and straining, he had his new crutch.

With some difficulty, he managed to get to his feet. The axe handle was too short to make a very good crutch, but it was sturdy and solid and once he wiped off the white blood it was very easy to hold onto. He took his first gentle step and-

Felt the cold, thorny grip of the she-creature finding his Achilles tendon. He gave a high-pitched scream and swung the axe like a golf club. It dislodged the grip, but now she rose up again, glaring whitely at him from the one eye left to her. Dan sized up his chances against the horrific creature, predicted the most likely outcome, and ran like hell.

It wasn't easy, she was behind him every step of the way, snatching at his clothing and shrieking unmentionable curses, but he finally managed to gain some headway.

That is, until the ground fell away from him.

He fell, tumbling headlong and landing awkwardly on his chest, knocking the wind out of him. The thing sniffed around where he had been, crooned out a few gruesome threats about what was going to happen to him once she found him(something about eating his eyes, maybe?) and circled a few times, calling. Finally, she seemed to give up and go away.

After a few long and painful minutes, he decided it was safe to move, and anyway the blood was really rushing to his head. He rolled ineptly to his back, just breathing for a moment. Finally, his breaths turned into gasps, and gasps then became laughter. He laughed for a side-aching amount of time, tears streaming down his face. He couldn't tell if it was relief, hysteria, or that he was merely going insane, but he was laughing. And he was safe.

Yes!

He was safe! He was safe! He was…

Back… in the pit again.

_**Damn**_.

He put his face in his hands. On the whole, he could not imagine this day getting any worse.

And then the pair of legs beside him lurched upright.

* * *

It was third grade again, only the whole school seemed to be underwater. The desks were about seven feet tall and equipped with bullhorns, some of them had coils of wire that sparked and spat like electric cats. Susie Armitage sat next to him again, only this time her skirt was so short he couldn't help but see her underwear, which was oddly rainbow striped. He was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle of lunchmeat, but the severed head of the class's pet rat kept eating pieces. He kept going to throw it away, but every time was overcome with tears.

Suddenly his hand was on the doorknob, he had to go to the bathroom reeeeeally bad, but the knob was soft like clay and wouldn't turn. He tried to kick it open but his legs had gone all rubbery on him, all his strength fled. Suddenly, old Mrs. Pierce called him to the front of the class in a voice like fork tines dragged over glass.

_Mr. West. _She hissed. _Have you been looking at Susie's undergarments again?_

He tried to answer no, but suddenly his mouth was full of school oatmeal and he couldn't swallow. He shook his head vehemently instead.

_**Mr. **__West, _she hissed, _are you aware that third period's homework is contained entirely on her panties?_

She held out the jar of ancient candy on her desk, but when he put his hand in it turned into fingers that writhed like maggots. He tried to scream, but only managed to throw himself violently backwards somehow. He landed on Susie's desk, where she was putting on thick eye shadow with an oversized brush.

_Herbert._ She called to him in a voice like a summer breeze. _Wake uuuu-uuup._

He blinked. It wasn't Susie. It was a man. Who was it?

Dan now sat in her seat, in her clothes, looking at him with his usual concern.

_Herb._ He said. _It's time to go._

He tried to get up and tell Dan that they didn't need to go, that if they went anywhere Dan would die, and he couldn't stand it if he died. But he felt a hand restraining him, shaking his shoulder.

"Herb." A weirdly familiar voice called to him. "It's time to get up. It's day."

His eyelids snapped open and lemon-yellow light flooded them. He felt the minor disorientation that always came with waking up in a strange place, and for a moment fumbled around in his head for who he was and what he was doing. Ash swam into focus at the other end of the tent, suddenly everything snapped into place. He was in Tennessee. Dan dead. Equipment lost. Glasses digging into his face. He hadn't meant to fall asleep.

"Geez Herb, you were gettin' all twitchy. I was afraid you were possessed." Ash stretched languidly, resembling a lanky dog.

The events of yesterday opened up in the encyclopedia of his mind, and he grinned. "Surely you would've gone for the hatchet if you really thought I was possessed."

Ash didn't answer, but thumbed over to Herbert's pillow of old clothing and his right arm. The hatchet was tightly gripped in Herbert's hand, so hard that the fingernails bit into his palm. He chuckled.

"I guess I'm a restless sleeper."

Ash finished stretching and yawned deeply, running a hand through his hair.

"I was having that weird dream again, the one where I break this mirror and all of these little me's come out, and they're all running around everywhere and then they make me eat one of them-"

"What's the plan for today?"

"Mmm?" Ash blinked at him, not really awake

"Did you have any plan, or were you just doing things as they came to you?"

"Uhh…I kinda…just…"

"I'll take that as a no." He stood up, and his head lifted the tarp. "Well, I think the first thing to do is to return to the bus depot and salvage what we can, and then follow the road out of here. After that, I plan to spend a few years working my way up through office, after which I will run for governor and have this placed firebombed out of existence."

Ash gave him that look again. "Um, sounds like a good plan Herbert. But…one thing."

"What?"

"Promise not to get mad?"

"No."

"Well…I don't think I can find the way back to the road in daylight."

The sound of a curse screamed at the top of someone's lungs reverberated across the trees.

* * *

Dan sat glumly on a mound of earth in his little refuge on the forest floor, chin in one hand, daylight filtering softly in from the canopy to speckle the floor. The useless axe lay in his limp grasp, the walls of the pit pockmarked with his attempts to use his only tool to escape.

Oh, and he wasn't alone. The severed lower half of some poor guy's body made another attempt to rise, catching itself before it overbalanced and rising upright as triumphantly as a body part can.

Dan sighed. Oh well. It could be worse. Sentient body parts in general were a terror, but legs themselves aren't very smart. Creaking dangerously, the pair made its way over to him.

He sighed again and lifted the axe, tipping the creature over for the fiftieth time so far. The thing kicked helplessly, managing only to heft itself onto the stump where the trunk had been attached. The legs bicycled furiously in the air. Dan would've laughed, but really, that was only funny the first ten times.

* * *

They ambled on, following one of the forest's many identical footpaths. Ash was looking determinedly ahead, Herbert was deliberately looking at everything but Ash. A snap sounded close to them, and Ash flip-cocked his shotgun. Herbert ground his teeth.

"Do you _have_ to do that?"

"No." Ash said, then did it again.

A few more minutes passed with only the sound of two people resolved not to talk to each other. Ash was contemplating whether having a traveling companion was really worth getting yelled at for five minutes, and debating whether to just shoot him now or wait for the inevitable possession by the inhuman forces that ruled the forest.

Herbert was tired and cranky and feeling even pricklier than normal. Normally Dan just put up with his moods and agreed with him for the sake of getting _something_ done, but Ash refused to humor him. He wondered if the scalpel set he had was enough, or would he have to resort to…other means? He contemplated sneaking up on him to circumvent his superior strength, but Ash was wary of every little noise, and probably the only person in these woods more paranoid than Herbert himself. Besides, what would he do for a human shield after Ash died?

Ash was eyeing the steep hill beside the path when he got one of his twinges. It was like the hairs on the back of his neck stood upright, but it hurt more than that. He could hear a hollow whistling in his ears too, a sound that didn't come from anything around him. He stopped Herbert with an arm across his chest.

"It's moving." He whispered.

* * *

Dan sat bored on the floor of the pit, digging notches with the axe. The legs had lost most of their animation and lay there, a twitch now and then but nothing more. He was so consumed by boredom that at first he didn't notice the air current that formed in the pit. The leaves littering the floor began to creep upward, the legs twitched with new energy.

He finally noticed when the pressure in the pit changed, as if he were in an airplane when the door had been opened. He heard it move, like the whispers of a thousand voices with one deeper voice drowning out the others. It spoke no discernable words, just a droning intonation that went on and on, rolling around in Dan's head until he thought he would be struck mad. He let go of his axe and fell to the floor, clapping his hands to his ears.

It must've taken all of three seconds to pass over the mouth of the pit, but to him it was like an eternity. He no longer felt his body, all that existed was the madness and his own disoriented consciousness, and he would fall forever…

A loud crack split eternity in two, knifing him across the void. Stars jumped behind his eyes and his body convulsed.

All at once it stopped and Dan thumped to the floor. He had been unaware of his own levitation, perhaps the shutting off of his rational mind had been a mercy.

He got up on his knees, dusted off, and assessed the damage. The legs had ceased to kick, perhaps they would never again. He wouldn't miss them. The loud crack had **not**, funnily enough, been his own sanity shattering.

A large oak adjacent to the pit had been split neatly in half, one dipping down low enough for him to grab hold and haul himself up. He stared at it for a moment, expecting it to vanish before his eyes or turn into a horrible monster or some other unlikely thing.

When it failed to do any of that he grasped his axe and threw it up onto the forest floor, grabbing hold of a limb and stepping on the severed legs to give himself a boost. After a few moment's trying, he rolled onto the forest floor, kissing sweet terra firma. Using his axe to steady himself, he peered around for a moment looking for a path.

Even in the dying light he couldn't see more than two or three trees ahead, so he sighed and picked a direction, hoping desperately that this one didn't lead back to the cabin.

* * *

Ash's body was taut as a bowstring, his face was white and sweat stood out on his brow. Herbert looked at him nervously; should the unthinkable happen and Ash collapse, he doubted his own aptitude in catching him. Ash's eyes snapped open and he gasped, handless arm shaking badly. Herbert pondered what to do before popping open a canteen and putting it to Ash's lips. He looked shocked for a moment before stimulus response took over and he gulped from it, barely stopping to breathe.

"Th…thanks." He panted, dragging an arm across his mouth. Herbert peered at him analytically.

"What was that all about?"

"Wha?" Ash looked a little out of it still. "When it…when it moves, I can…_feel_ it."

"Oh." Herbert said noncommittally. "Is this going to be a reoccurring thing? Because I'd like to be notified if this is going to happen again."

Ash looked a bit better now, color coming back to his cheeks. "Listen, smartass, this is the only way to tell if It's coming any closer. We lucked out this time, I think It thinks we're dead, but if it comes much closer, we'll have more to worry about."

"Like what?" Herbert didn't like ambiguity.

Ash thought a moment. "Like…I can't explain, alright? Just trust me, it's gonna get worse before it gets better."

They picked a direction and started off, no point in following landmarks. They couldn't be trusted.

Ahead was a cabin.

* * *

_Author's note: The title from this chapter comes from an H.P. Lovecraft story(like anyone's surprised), taken from a quote of the Necronomicon: "_For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaw_s." There's more to it than that, but I'm trying to keep this short for once. The dream Herbert has is just random surreality, make of it what you want, but I really liked the puzzle of lunchmeat part. I can't say why, I just do. Ash's dream is a nod to Army of Darkness, even though I'm not going with it's continuity here I thought I'd slip that in. There may be a couple more chapters to this, maybe less, I'm just kinda playing it by ear at the moment. Well, so much for keeping the author's note short. XD_


	4. In the Valley of Madness

**In the Valley of Madness**

* * *

Ash and Herbert walked in tandem, the former's arm wrapped around the latter's shoulder. It was more for progress's sake than anything else; none of the men in the camp had a shoe size even approaching Ash's, so it was either the one-size-too-small Keds or the steel toe boots that looked like they were made for a draft horse. The Keds were the winners, though they pinched a bit coming on and made Ash limp after a few hours.

They followed yet another path that was not on the map. It didn't matter anyway. Ash said the forest had a way of keeping you there, whether you wanted to stay or not. He had once followed a small brook for half a day, and either he had gotten turned around or it had looped back on itself, because he ended up exactly where he started. Not some identical spot; the gouge he had made in a tree was still there.

While they half-limped, half-dragged themselves forward, the cylindrical path they were on became spiral, and the trees drew themselves back. The trail ahead of them was entirely open, and led to a familiar patch of forest.

* * *

Dan shuffled forward, the periodic flash of pain from his right leg becoming a dull throb. That wasn't a good sign, but he couldn't do anything else for it. He had dressed it, crudely, and given it as much rest as he could spare. Without modern methods, he was probably going to limp severely for the rest of his life, however long that was.

It was nice though, walking through the woods without some horrific ghoul tearing ass after you. Pleasant, almost. He could almost ignore the creepy whispering noises coming from the trees, if he also blocked out the fact the branches were swaying from a wind that did not exist.

His walk would've been peaceful, boring even, if fate and a few other dark forces just making themselves known hadn't seen fit to throw another man in his path.

Crouching over the wreckage of what appeared to be a forester's jeep and wearing clothes too academic to be very warm was a middle-aged man just going to fat, his hair one waxy brown mass parted to the side. Despite the cold he had sweated through his shirt in several places. He looked like he had been here hours, days maybe, and had the wide sleepless gaze to prove it. He reacted to Dan the way chickens react to anything with pointy ears and a bushy red tail.

"Stop _right_ there! _Stay __**back!**_**" **Heshoutedbrandishing a gun that obviously wasn't his. Dan stopped and held one hand up, making sure to keep the other one in sight as well. He felt that instinctual cold clench that he always felt around weaponry, he had always thought the world was filled with violence and destruction enough without adding more to it.

"Hey, hey, it's ok, I'm stopped. See?"

"Show me your other hand." The man had the tiniest bit of a Boston twang, he was probably familiar with the Miskatonic massacre. Best not to introduce himself.

"I can't, it's holding me up." He swiveled around so that his hand was visible, eyes always on the face of his detainer.

The man eyed it and blinked rapidly. He had been in this spot for too long, hadn't gotten much sleep. That didn't exactly work to Dan's advantage; a sleepy gunman was far more likely to shoot you on accident than on principle.

"Wh-wh-who are you? What are you doing here?" He punctuated every sentence by giving his gun hand a little flourish, which did little to ease Dan's nerves.

"My name's…Bruce. Abbott. Bruce Abbott. Look, I was here with some of my buddies, then there was this explosion…I'm lucky to be alive." One beneficial side effect of being Herbert West's wingman was that he had become a much more proficient liar. He wasn't proud of himself.

The man lowed the barrel of the gun slightly. "M-my name is Richard Atwood. _P-professor_ Richard Atwood. I'm a member of the physics department at Arkham University."

Which didn't really help much.

Dan cautiously lowered his left hand. The professor didn't notice. He was much too busy sending spooked looks to the surrounding forest. Dan had become very adept at reading body language, and the professor fidgeted like someone who had had too much terror all at once and was trying to figure out what to be afraid of. He seemed to be wavering between the silhouetted trees and Dan himself.

"So, uh, Richard…Rich? What are you doing out here?"

Atwood jumped and looked back at Dan, as if he had already started forgetting his existence.

"I–I–I-I'm a colleague of Professor Knowby. He-he's been missing for over a year, an-an-and his last letter said that he was coming…here."

Ahh. He had come here looking for someone and walked into hell with both eyes wide open. Dan found that people were often willing to go to extremes that a rational mind wouldn't dare for the people they cared about. Himself included.

"Well then, Rich, did you drive yourself here or…" He let his question dangle.

"I c-called up the forestry service f-from the next county. He brought me in here…" He eyed the thicket beside them nervously, Dan guessed that was the direction his driver had last gone off in.

"So, the two of you crashed?"

"N-no. We didn't hit a thing." His stutter was more under control now, though he was still perspiring heavily. He was calming down in the company of another human being in this seemingly endless track of woods.

"So then why-"

"_It wasn't my fault, okay!_" The man suddenly shrieked, both hands gripping the pistol now. "_I didn't touch a thing, I told him! It was the tree, I saw it! The tree moved into the path on its own!_" He choked out, not really looking at Dan anymore.

"Hey, hey, it's all right now." Dan was very aware of the fact that he could see straight down the barrel to what might've been a bullet in the chamber. "I know. The trees went crazy where I was too. They ripped one of my friends in _half_ man."

The man with the gun appraised him unsteadily. "The tree here didn't do that. It just…it _fell_ on the car, but it wasn't there before. I tried to tell the man, I did, but then he saw something go off in the woods and he followed it."

"What was it?" Dan asked, the man looking at him suspiciously. Good, keep him talking, keep him occupied and maybe he won't blow your head off.

"I don't know." The man's shoulders fell a little. "I-I didn't see it, and he didn't tell me what it was. He just leapt from the car and went after it…"

"When was that?"

"Hours ago."

Dan swore a little in his head. It would've been much better if the forester had survived; even though the only means of conveyance was smashed, at least the man in uniform was equipped to deal with the unexpected better than a man who would wear a _suit_ on an expedition.

"I don't believe you." The man said out of nowhere.

"I…huh?"

"I don't believe you saw your friends die. You're too calm, and I know that only killers and sociopaths are so unaffected by death."

Great, now the man was so panicked he clung to every bit of authority he had, trying to boss the fear from his body. Dan supposed it was only natural that Atwood would fall back on it, he was still pretty near college age and probably resembled some of his male students.

"L-look, I've been wandering in the woods since _yesterday_, I've been alone this entire time, so forgive me if I have a little relief at finding another human being within a five-mile radius!" He snapped, letting some of his exasperation show.

"Oh really?" The professor sneered. "Then what is that?"

With the gun he pointed to Dan's makeshift splint. A knot formed in Dan's stomach. He tried to play it cool.

"Boyhood in the scouts." He grinned at the professor. "Didn't know I was so good."

Atwood puffed up. "No boy scout could make a splint that well."

"What do you know? You're in physics, not medicine!"

With a nasty click, the gun rose until it pointed at his head. "How do you know that?"

Dan gulped. This was beginning to feel uncomfortably familiar. "You said earlier. Remember?" _Please don't shoot me_. He added in his head.

Atwood lowered the gun slightly and scowled. "Well, maybe you're telling the truth, and maybe you're lying. Either way, I don't care. I've got the gun, and if you try anything funny you'll find yourself in a bad place, Sonny Jim."

Dan had a feeling that if he tried anything, period, he would find himself hastily shot full of holes by a man who tried to act as if he handled guns on a regular basis and failed miserably.

"Now, you walk ahead of me and again, no funny business!"

Dan swallowed his retort that he had been doing that very thing before meeting up with the good professor and marched ahead rather shakily.

* * *

It was sundown again, the chill mist creeping onto the path once more. Ash didn't complain but Herbert knew that if they didn't find a place to stop for the night, the taller man would collapse and leave him unprotected. Though he was largely unhurt compared to his companion, he was growing fatigued and doubted he could fend off another attack by himself.

But, by some unknown providence the woods ahead of them thinned and before them lay a cabin, looking deserted and possibly haunted. Herbert didn't care. It could be full of cats, which he particularly didn't care for, shrieking and yowling and marking their territory, he wouldn't care. It could have the disembodied horde of the late and unlamented Dr. Hill for all he cared. All he knew was that it was the first closed shelter he'd seen in days, and he felt like he could dance. He wouldn't, but he could.

He turned to Ash, who didn't seem to share his enthusiasm.

"N…no…" He whispered, eyes big as saucers.

"Ash? What's the matter?"

Ash had gone chalky and his left hand dropped his shotgun which, mercifully, didn't go off. Cartridges were scarce.

"Th-that's impossible!" His voice raised to a shout. "I can't be here! Not again!"

"Ash!"

Ash started to back away, head shaking in denial of nothing in particular. Herbert tried to grasp one of his hands, but Ash evaded his touch.

"I'm here again…it's where…but no, everyone's gone!"

Herbert looked at Ash, then the cabin, putting two and two together. "This is the cabin, isn't it?"

"_Yes_." Ash whispered, now in the beginning stages of hysteria. "This is where everyone…_god_, I thought I'd never see it again!"

"Yes, well," Herbert stated calmly, "We're going inside now Ash. _Both_ of us."

Ash looked at Herbert as if he had grown another head and suggested they take unicycling lessons. "_What_?"

He took Ash's hand in his and made him look him in the eye. "_Ash_. We. Are. Going. In."

"But-"

"We won't survive a night out in the open. There might be materials in there, we could put up a barricade, confine ourselves to one room. But we _are_ going in."

"B-b-but-" Ash babbled feebly. It was no use. In a contest of wills, Herbert would always win.

"You're injured, more than you'd care to admit. I can treat you in there."

Those words struck home. They had found a first-aid kit in the camp, but it hadn't nearly been enough. Ash's eyes felt swollen and dry in his head, all he wanted was to get somewhere out of the elements and lie down. The temptation of sleep was gradually overcoming his crushing fear of the cabin that had started the whole business.

Then, accidentally-on-purpose, Herbert's finger grazed a shallow wound on Ash's shoulder. He winced, and then looked down at himself for a few long minutes.

"Okay." He said dryly, licking his lips. "Let's go inside."

* * *

The cabin was surprisingly unclaimed by nature, and many creature comforts still remained. Ash flopped down on the sofa, brushing aside the scratchy old horsehair blanket his sister had insisted on bringing that was now oddly splotched with that he hoped was mud. Herbert busied himself building a fire, fetching water from the pump in a bucket to put over the fire. While it heated, he instructed Ash to undress. Ash stared at him.

"It's okay, I'm a doctor."

"That's what they all say, dude." But he did as asked.

First he tugged the shoes off of his bloodless feet, grimacing in pain. He stripped his shirt off next, wincing as it stuck to him in several painful places. While Herbert oversaw his bucket and tore bed sheets for bandages Ash massaged the feeling back into his feet.

Finally, Herbert slopped his bucket over to Ash, dipped in a cloth, and set to work cleaning Ash's many scrapes and gashes. Ash made a great effort not to cry out; he hadn't realized how many cuts and bruises he'd collected in the past few day's being tossed around.

Herbert watched Ash pretend not to feel pain, and tried to remember some of Dan's counsel on how to be a good doctor.

_Beside manner, _memory-Dan said, _is very important, especially if you are working without anesthesia. To distract the patients from pain, try talking to them. Keep up a stream of conversation, but don't just present idle chatter. Talk about something the patient cares about, that keeps it from sounding superfluous and hollow. _

He smiled for a moment before remembering his current situation and sobering up. He wouldn't forget Dan, but he couldn't think of him constantly.

"So…" He began. So far so good. "What happened to you after your friends were gone?" Oh_**smooth**_Ash winced, though he hadn't hit a sore spot.

"I don't wanna talk about that right now. Can't that keep until later?"

"Later, later." Herbert mocked him, drawing the bloodied cloth steadily across his back. "What if it's something I need to know? What if it's a matter of life or death? What if-"

"Okay, okay, enough with the what if?'s." Ash groaned. Herbert lobbed a soiled cloth into the corner and got a fresh one. "But if I tell you that, you've got to promise me something."

"What?" Herbert asked peevishly. "I'm not going to agree to something sight unseen, just because-"

"No." Ash turned around, his gaze dark and intent. "You're going to agree to it, because those are the terms. No agreement, no story, comprende?"

Herbert met his gaze, wavering between outright defiance and interest, before his inherent scientist's curiosity won.

"Fine." He grumbled. Ash nodded, shifting back to his original position.

"After everyone was dead, or dispatched by yours truly, I thought it was over. I was safe. That's what I thought." He covered his face in a hand that shook with exhaustion. "I don't know why I was so stupid. Thought it got my friends but I got off scot-free… I was outside when it came back."

Herbert finished and gave his shoulder a pat, turning him around once more. "It came back?"

"Yeah." Ash flinched as Herbert began cleaning a nasty gash just below his eye. "I was just standing outside, like there was anywhere to go. It took the bridge out, and I didn't know any other way out of the valley. Then…I hear it, and I turn around right when it hits me…" He trailed off, eyes on the fireplace. Herbert lowered his hand.

"So…you…you ran into it?"

Ash nodded, still avoiding eye contact. "I was possessed. I guess that's why…"

Herbert nodded. It made sense. Ash must still have a connection to the force, perhaps a small amount of it remained at all times. That last thought made Herbert's temperature drop suddenly.

Ash was looking at him now, reading his face. "Yeah…that. That's why I made you promise. It let me go, though. I don't know whether it was the day coming, or that I was stronger than my friends…maybe it isn't anything, really. All I know is, it let me go. Even after it left, I guess a little bit was still in me. It got into my hand and it went bad, so I lopped it off at the wrist. But that doesn't mean it won't be back. I want you to promise me…"

Herbert was very alert now, mind darting to all possible exits.

"If it…if it gets me again, I want you to do the right thing."

It was literally the last thing he expected Ash to say. His brow furrowed. "So, that means…"

"Yes. My shotgun, or whatever's handy. Then the hatchet. Chop me up real good, so I don't come back."

The surrealism of the conversation struck him, and he stared at Ash. Ash met his gaze now, not a hint of emotion in his face.

"O…okay." He said finally. Ash nodded, looking relieved. Then he winced, putting a hand to his shoulder. Herbert shooed his hand away and appraised the wound. A fairly large splinter had embedded itself in his deltoid muscle, and it looked like more than fingernails could take.

"I'm going to have to get a sewing needle for that." Herbert said, and savored Ash's grimace of pain.

Later, when all wounds that could be were taken care of, Ash spread out haphazardly on the couch while Herbert took the floor in front of the fireplace. The fire was dying down, but Herbert could not let sleep claim him.

He kept going over Ash's words in his mind, trying to find out exactly what about them disturbed him. Ash was so willing to sacrifice his own life, it was mind-boggling to West. He had come across so many people who clung judiciously to their lives, some hanging on by willpower alone. He didn't begrudge them their selfishness, it was what had started him on his career path. But he had never met a human being who valued other's lives so much that he'd volunteer his own. Except maybe Dan…

He sighed and rubbed his eyes tiredly. Dan would gladly have taken his own life if it meant one of his patients living. Dan cared. Dan was dead. Ash would probably die as well.

Herbert, who was more than willing to sacrifice others to extend his own life, probably had many more years before him. He wondered how people still believed in universal justice.

The fire cracked and popped in a comforting way, and Herbert found his eyelids lowering of their own accord. He was so drowsy, and it was so peaceful, even the floor was comfortable…

* * *

Dan trudged on, having to drag his feet to prevent the older man from falling too far behind. Atwood was not the outdoors type, he hadn't even worn hiking shoes. He huffed and puffed, stopping every twenty feet or so to ease the stitch in his side. Whatever pity Dan might've felt for him dispelled as Atwood began barking orders at him.

They were all simple and unnecessary. _Sit. Up. Walk. Stop._ Dan resisted the temptation to wrestle the gun from his grasp; whether it hit him or Atwood, he didn't want any more loss of life.

It was nearly pitch-black, there was still no moon, when the trees ahead of them thinned. Atwood seemed cheered, but Dan knew from experience that open ground simply meant less cover.

The last of the trees were behind them, they were overlooking-

"No!" He cried, forgetting Atwood and his gun, forgetting everything but the terror pooling in the pit of his stomach.

Atwood jabbed him in the ribs. "Be quiet!"

"But, no- it can't- not _here_, please!"

"Be _quiet_." He hissed, brandishing his pistol. "We are going down there now, you and I."

"Not in there, please, anywhere but there!" He was on the point of sobbing, nearly incoherent, but didn't care. His arms pinwheeled, and Atwood pressed cold steel to his temple. He calmed down quickly.

"Do you know what this is?"

"Y-yes." He swallowed with a dry click.

"You're going to do what I say. And you're going to do it. _Now_." He gave Dan's temple a little prod with the barrel to emphasize his point.

Dan stood for a moment, caught between the forest sinister and Atwood's demented will. Then he sighed and took a step forward.

* * *

Herbert blinked awake. The fire was out. He didn't know how long he had slept. He forgot what had woken him, and then there it was again. A rapping on the door. Ash was already up and loading his shotgun. He cocked it, went behind the couch, and nodded to Herbert.

_Open the door_ he mouthed to Herbert. Herbert shook off his misgivings about Ash's marksmanship and tiptoed to the door, standing clear as he turned the knob. The door let in a flood of cold and-

Herbert backed away, mouth hung open in shock. Then, in a tone approaching amazement, he shouted.

"_Dan_?"

* * *

_Author's note: phew. Almost didn't get this chapter done. Sorry if it's a little late. I'd estimate about two or three chapters until the end. Professor Atwood is another Lovecraft reference, Knowby is from __**Evil Dead**__, but you probably knew that already. On a personal note, I finally saw __**From Beyond**__ the other day. Combs was awesome, as always, but it was no __**Reanimator**__. However, I'd really recommend the director's commentary, it's both funny and informative, and you get to hear about how fake brains taste! See you next chapter._


	5. The Resurrection Man

**The Resurrection Man**

* * *

The man who had followed Herbert's footsteps since that fateful autumn in Miskatonic valley, the man he thought lost when the world turned upside-down, stood in the doorway. Dan, much worse for the wear, gripped the doorway with white knuckles. He and Herbert stared at each other with naked shock, both quite sure that the other had died.

The silence lasted a full minute; everyone seemed to hold their breath. Ash, behind the couch, wondered idly if he had been forgotten.

Then, Herbert moved.

He crossed the room in three quick strides and stopped just before Dan, peering at him from behind his thick lenses. Neither moved a muscle. Then, Herbert reached up cautiously and gave Dan what could technically be counted as a hug.

"You're alive." He murmured, eyes screwed shut against Dan's shoulder.

Dan felt a warm flush spreading across his face. "Yeah. I know." He returned the hug as best he could with one arm.

"I hate to interrupt this tender moment," said a new voice, "but I don't think we've been introduced."

Herbert opened his eyes and found himself staring down the barrel of a gun.

"Oh." He said.

"Yes, _that_, I'm afraid." Said Dan.

* * *

The uncomfortably moist gentleman with the pistol shoved Dan rudely to the side with his elbow and stepped into the room. His grip looked steady, but his hand was so slick with perspiration that Herbert winced at every sudden movement he made. He had never really trusted academics with guns, and this one was entirely too self-confident.

"Yes, gentlemen, I'm sorry to break up the hallmark card commercial, but I'm afraid I have to-" he stopped. And looked around.

"Good _**god**_." He whispered, taking in the decay. "What _happened_?"

"You wanna know what happened?" Came a fourth voice from behind the couch. Dan looked quizzically at Herbert, who raised an eyebrow.

Ashley Williams rose from behind his shield, shotgun trained on the newcomers. Atwood took in Ash's appearance, the stump hand, the improvised bandages, his mouth pressed into a grim line. The tension in the room was so thick you couldn't chip it with a chainsaw. Dan, being Dan…

"Hey now, let's, uh…let's cool down." He bit his lip. "I think introductions are in order." He looked to Herbert who nodded.

"I've had enough pleasantries for today, my boy." Atwood murmured, never taking his eyes off Ash. "What I want to know is why you happen to be in what appears to be my colleague's cabin. I'd also like to know why this young man's_ chums -_" he gave Dan a nasty smirk, "-whom he informed me were _deceased_, are now inhabiting it. Take your time, gentlemen, but the clock is ticking. I want answers. Now."

Dan shifted his shoulder, both to ease the cramp forming in his right arm and to conceal Herbert's look of contempt from the professor. Ash just stood where he was, still as a scarecrow, finger on the trigger. Dan attempted to diffuse the situation once more.

"Um, since…since no one else seems to want to start, I think I'll go. I'm…I'm Daniel Cain, and this…this is my friend, Herbert West." Herbert gave him a curious glance, Ash still didn't move. "And, well, uh, this-this is Professor Atwood. Richar-"

"That's enough boy, you don't think I know my own name?" Atwood snapped. Dan felt Herbert go rigid beside him and gritted his teeth. The moment he fired a single bullet, one of them would be on him.

"I want answers, right now. _Where is Professor Knowby_?"

Silence ticked through the room. Dan felt a movement at his side and knew Herbert had produced a scalpel, a #18 by the way he gripped it. The silence was split by the most unpleasant sound Dan had ever heard. One he often heard from Herbert. But Herbert, returning his paralyzed gaze, was silent.

At the other end of the room, Ash laughed.

It wasn't a particularly pleasant laugh; it was a laugh that had been through too much, screamed too often to ever have joy again. Ash laughed from a throat that was scarred from the daily horrors he had lived with in this valley, caked with bitterness and anger; he laughed and it sounded like a horse dying.

"Sure, Knowby." He chuckled. "You're looking for Professor _Knowby_?" he pealed out a fresh gale of laughter.

Atwood turned red to the roots of his faded brown hair. The gun shook a little and Dan heard a quiet little click. The safety was off. That he knew to do that much, Dan was surprised. Perhaps the forester had taught him before being swallowed up by the woods.

Around his waist, Herbert's arms began gently pulling him away from the line of fire, trying to seem like they weren't moving at all. Dan gulped and leaned heavily on him.

"Yes." Atwood said in a voice of barely contained fury. "I want to know where he is."

"He's dead." Ash laughed his raw laugh again. "**Dead**. Been dead almost a year."

Atwood's finger began gently squeezing the trigger back. A few millimeters, it would fire.

"Aw, come off it Atwood, I didn't kill him." Ash snorted. Dan stopped for a second, gaze bouncing between Atwood and Ash, like a rat watching two snakes. He knew that whoever fired first, it would be him that got the worst of it.

The man's brow came together in a solid knot between his eyes. The gun shook ever so slightly.

"Yes you did." Atwood whispered.

Dan flinched. "But Rich-"

"Don't _you_ start either!" Atwood shouted, flipping his gun in Dan's direction. "'_Bruce Abbot'_, hah! I knew the minute I saw you, you necrophilic malpractitioner! I was just a little thrown off because I didn't see your little accomplice right by you. But now I see. The_ Miskatonic Murders_."

"The Miskatonic _Massacre_." Herbert corrected. Dan shushed him. "Hey, he should know."

Atwood glared at Herbert, that instinctive hatred that all teachers felt upon being acquainted with his rather prickly sense of superiority.

"I-I _knew_ that! A-and here you stand, nothing but two-bit muh-muh-_murderers_! And I suppose you little f-friend here helped you dispose of the evidence! Just a bunch of grave robbers, you are!" His voice rose to nearly a shriek. His gun weaved in a drunken pattern, making Dan's stomach churn with worry. At this point, they were all fair game.

Ash laughed again. Somehow, there was even less humor than before.

"Knowby was dead by the time he got here. Remember that book? The one Knowby came up here to research? _That_ killed him. He called some kinda mumbo-jumbo out of it and it killed him. Killed plenty of my friends, too."

Calmly but definitely, Ash walked out from behind the couch. Ire burned in Atwood's eyes, and fear, too. Dan could tell by how his eyes moved that the man was making the mental calculations all people made in this situation.

Him me death.

Him me guns ?

Herbert didn't intend to let him finish his devil's arithmetic; Dan felt him tense, like a coiled spring, and knew he was about to strike.

"How very poetic, the ravings of a lunatic." Atwood said acidly. "This is almost like a movie, stumbling upon a nest of psychotic killers-"

"Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Herbert intoned boredly.

Atwood looked at him. "What?"

"The movie. They go to backwoods Texas and they find a bunch of-"

"Nononono." He shook his head. "I meant the other one."

"What other one?" Dan asked.

Atwood's forehead wrinkled in thought. "It's a bunch of friends, and they're all going to their cabin…I think it's called La Casa or something…"

Dan almost chuckled at the absurdity of their current situation; stuck in a crossfire between two possible maniacs with guns, talking movies. Which is why it came as such a shock when Herbert threw him aside, hurling his concealed scalpel with deadly accuracy. Atwood's face registered only shock at first, he tried to look down and see the tiny blade buried in his Adam's apple. His eyes, now glazing over, rose to his killer. Herbert returned the stare, face an emotionless blank. After what seemed an eternity, Atwood gurgled and fell to the side like a pile of wet laundry, fingernails scraping desperately at the steel protruding from his throat. The whole cabin was silent for a minute after he fell.

"_Jesus_." Ash breathed at last. "_**God**_, Herbert."

Herbert straightened up from his throwing crouch, primly brushing the front of his shirt.

"_God_ had nothing to do with this." He said dryly.

Dan, just staring at where the professor had been, now rounded on Herbert.

"You killed another human being! _Again!_"

Herbert looked at him coolly. "He was threatening you Daniel. He threatened all of us."

"He was another human being!"

"He was going to shoot you."

"Not that you even care about other human beings!"

"He was clearly unstable."

"And what if he shot me when you did that?!"

"I was only protecting _you_, Dan, after all-"

"All you care about is yourself!"

"-You _are_ my partner."

They stood, one man glaring at the other. Ash, behind the couch, followed about half the conversation.

Dan glared at Herbert. Herbert's stoic gaze fell on Dan. Finally, the façade cracked and Dan smiled, just a little. He surprised Herbert with a crushing bear hug.

"_It's good that you're alive, you misanthropic bastard_." He growled in Herbert's ear. Herbert, shocked at first, returned the crushing hug as best he could. Someone behind them cleared their throat. They broke apart to see Ash's bemused smile.

"That's real nice that you made up, fellas." He drawled. "But what do we do about him?"

The professor, momentarily forgotten, lay still where he was. His eyes were still open.

Dan shuddered. "I didn't like the guy, but I think we should do something, uh, respectful with the body." He caught Herbert's raised eyebrow. "Hey, he led me back here to you guys. We _could_ show him a little consideration."

Herbert sighed and shrugged. "Okay. Let's wrap him in the blanket and put him somewhere. Does this place have a cellar?"

"**NO!**" Ash bellowed, surprising his acquaintances. "I…I mean _no_. This place doesn't have a cellar. Let's put him in one of the bedrooms."

Dan gave Herbert an odd look. Herbert raised one shoulder and let it drop.

They evaluated Atwood's body, pondering the revolver beside it. No one wanted to be the first to touch it. Dan saw Ash's mouth open and raised his hand to grab it, unwilling to put all their guns in one basket, so to speak. He still wasn't sure about Herbert's traveling companion. Herbert surprised both of them again by snatching the gun out of Atwood's hand and tucking it neatly in his waistband.

"What?" he said. Dan and Ash exchanged glances, Ash trying not to laugh. Dan felt dangerously close to hilarity himself. It was odd, with all the terror around them, but Dan felt happy and safe for the first time in days.

"Okay." Ash said, breaking the stifling silence. "Let's eat, and try and regroup a little."

* * *

Dan found his stomach was extraordinarily empty and, even after finding a mire-choked streamlet not five hours ago, he was thirsty too. Herbert broke out the rations as Ash busied himself building up the fire again. Dan sat down, his body steeping in heat. Someone handed him a canteen and a cereal bar, he thanked them while his eyes blinked stupidly. The fatigue of his long days in the forest were finally catching up to him. He wasn't the only one. Ash looked dangerously close to falling over and Herbert blinked his eyes repeatedly, like a cranky toddler. It looked like this survivalist shindig was going to turn into a slumber party.

* * *

_On the highest hill, it felt something._

* * *

Dan reclined in front of the fire, unwilling to lay down on the couch. It still spooked him a little. Herbert curled up next to him, just barely resting his head on Dan's abdomen. Ash sat up on the couch, head falling peacefully back against the lumpy cushioning.

* * *

_The other had returned to the place, the first place. The house of its birth. If It understood such a concept, It would have been amazed at Its luck. _

_It leaped into movement, the shriek of its velocity tearing leaves off the trees. It wouldn't need trees today. It had new victims, and a conduit into the physical. It was happy, in a way._

* * *

Dan slept like a rock, arm curled protectively around Herbert, who drooled slightly on Dan's sweater. Ash stirred slightly in his sleep, eyes twitching back and forth beneath their lids, snoring fitfully. The whole house was still, not a breeze.

* * *

_It kept to a reasonable speed, there was no point in destroying the domicile. Perhaps It was a bit sentimental. Or perhaps It wished to take the new with stealth rather than force. Either way, it crept closer…_

* * *

Herbert woke in a cold sweat. He had stopped dreaming shortly after he began routinely injecting himself with reagent, but this hadn't been a dream. It had been…foreboding? Yes, a strong sense of foreboding, that got worse and worse until he woke.

He struggled to a sitting position, rubbing the bridge of his nose where the eyepieces cut into it. There was something different about the cabin now…a change in air pressure maybe? It felt heavier, almost as if it was waiting for something.

And then Herbert realized what was wrong. The silence.

Ash was a very loud sleeper. Before, the sound of his snores had filled the cabin. Now the only sound he could make out was his own constricted breathing.

It might mean nothing. Then again it might not.

Herbert tried to breathe silently.

The right side of his face burned, he wanted to turn and look but knew he must not. His hand crept silently to Dan's side, fingers pinching cloth and shaking it. He tried to wake Dan as quietly as possible, confining his movement to the side that was facing away from the couch. Dan stirred in his sleep, Herbert wincing at his sleep murmurs. He shook harder, back stiff and taut with anxiety. Dan turned and woke. "Wha-"

Herbert immediately clamped a hand over his mouth, listening intently. No noise from the couch.

Dan removed his hand. "Herbert, wh-"

"_Shhh_!" Herbert hissed, stomach coiling in terror. He met Dan's eyes, trying to tell him without words what was going on.

_Stay down_. He mouthed. _Couch._

Dan's eyes flicked to the couch. _Ash_?

Herbert nodded almost imperceptibly.

Dan's hand moved stealthily to the hatchet Herbert still kept by his head, eyes trying to pick out shapes in the darkness. There was no movement from the couch, no demon rising from the cushions to attack. The blankets arranged peacefully on the couch looked flat, almost like…

Like there was no person underneath them.

A vicelike grip closed around Herbert's forearm and squeezed. He turned, breath caught in his chest, and found himself looking into milky orbs, in a face very familiar. Ash's face.

"Dan-" was all he managed to choke out before another hand clamped around his throat and he was raised unceremoniously into the air.

Dan, fingers scrabbling for the hatchet, was paralyzed by the scene before him. Herbert's savior, the man who had run for as long as he could, was now under the full possession of the thing that ruled this woods. Herbert turned red, choking, his feet lashed out harmlessly and bounced off his captor's chest. His hands clawed futilely at Ash's hold, gun lost or forgotten. Dan noted with horrified disgust that the hand that held Herbert, Ash's right hand, was a mottled purple and green and was roughly attached at the wrist. With a painful-sounding crack, Ash's head suddenly turned to face Dan, who had bad deja-vu. While not as decayed as the female earlier, there was a striking resemblance. That was only furthered when evil-Ash opened its mouth and let out a groan that seemed to come from the other end of a long tunnel.

"_Joooooiiiiiiiiiin uuuuuuuusssssss…_"

* * *

_Author's note: Okay, back on track again. From now on I'll try to update regularly, though there isn't much left. Sorry if it seems like I killed Atwood off too quickly, he has a purpose, honest. About two chapters left to go!_


	6. Dead by Dawn

**Dead by Dawn**

* * *

Ash stood, Herbert dangling from his fist, grinning horrifically. Dan was completely frozen, watching the life slowly drain from his partner's eyes. Herbert's face had gone from red to purple, and he ceased to kick.

"_Joooooooooiiiiin uuuussssssssss._" Ash-thing hissed.

Terror had flooded Dan's senses, paralyzing his limbs, freezing his mind. His numb fingers scrabbled mindlessly on the floor, no longer even looking for the hatchet. They bumped into something hard and Dan gripped it without thinking. From somewhere deep within himself, Dan found the strength to rise, eyes on Herbert's now still body. Ash-thing cocked its head and laughed at him, a deep, throaty laugh that sounded like the woods pinned in a human body.

Dan felt the object in his hands and found it was a small metal box. He fumbled with its catch and heard the tinkle of glass and metal hitting the ground, and finally tore his gaze away from the horrifying spectacle before him. Syringes littered the ground, and a vial of-

Dan's insides leapt. Thank god for Herbert's inability to tell the truth. He had promised before their departure from New England that he had kicked the reagent habit entirely. The glowing vial at his feet told a different story. Scooping up the vial and a few syringes, he made eye contact again with Ash. Ash was still looking at him, Herbert flopping lifelessly in his grip. Dan's stomach clenched again, and he promised himself that someday he would develop the reagent enough to bring back its late, lamented creator.

He had the tools, knew how they worked, but how to use them. He had a vague idea the reagent would level the playing field, but how?

Atwood.

Ash finally dropped Herbert, who thudded to the floor like a marionette with cut strings. Dan winced, and began edging to the door. He would only get one chance at this, and he had to make it count.

He turned and ran through a door, Ash-thing close on his heels. However, he was still in possession of all his senses, and turned before he hit the back of the closet. Ash-thing, comprised of a consciousness not accustomed to the human body, ran full steam after him and slammed against the wall. Dan darted out and shouldered the door closed, frantically shoving the couch and everything else he could find in front of the door. That done, he turned to his fallen friend. The blood was slowly draining out of Herbert's face, but it was still unnaturally dark. He moved to clamp his nose shut and begin CPR, but the closet door gave a mighty thump and his barricade moved and inch or two.

Wrenching himself from his former partner, Dan ran wildly down the hall, overshooting Atwood's room in his haste and having to turn back. Every second beat red-hot in his mind, anxiety quaking in his hands. He tried to steady them and uncovered Atwood's corpse, wincing at the feeling of flesh already gone to rigor mortis. Mindful of the roaring and thuds coming from the closet, he uncapped a syringe and immediately bent it with clumsy fingers. He tried another and scratched himself, dropping it to the floor. He calmed himself and uncapped the last and, just as ash-thing gave a triumphant roar and the door gave, he drew the green fluid into the syringe.

As the thing thumped down the hall, searching, he pulled up Atwood's head and found the sweet spot, right at the base of the skull. He emptied the syringe just as Ash-thing burst through the door, snarling. He threw the needle at it and retreated to the far corner of the room, willing the reagent to work.

Ash-thing stepped on Atwood's torso, grinning bloodily. The reattached hand squirmed on his wrist, like an overeager puppy. The left hand held Dan's crutch-axe. Dan winced and ducked his head, ready for the sickening blow of metal against flesh. It never came.

Instead, a great, wailing cry. Dan and Ash-thing both looked to the middle of the room, where Atwood's corpse opened sanguineous eyes and cried again, writhing. Birth was always painful.

With Ash-thing temporarily transfixed, Dan tried to move to a less inconspicuous corner. If the thing went after him instead of Ash, it would've been both a disaster and a delicious irony.

With a wet roar, Atwood heaved himself up again, barreling into Ash like a linebacker. Mumbling a quick thanks to the deceased professor in his head, Dan bolted down the hall to the living room again.

* * *

Herbert lay sprawled on the floor like a bad dream, lips blue.

"_Twelve minute barrier_." Dan heard Hill sneer from his memories. He waved the thought away and knelt over Herbert, clamping the nose shut and opening the mouth. He had no idea how many minutes it had been, or if this had any chance of working. But he had to try.

Puff, puff. Strong, steady breaths. Work the solar plexus; gentle, firm pressure.

The seconds dragged on, the sounds of the battle raging on merely background noise, Dan concentrating his entire focus to the body before him. Long past the point where other doctors would give up, Dan was still trying, though a little rougher in his actions. As a dresser in one of the rooms shattered from the force of a body thrown into it, Dan blew breath into Herbert's body so forcefully his head swam. He pounded drunkenly at Herbert's chest as part of the wall behind him splintered, Ash's demonic visage poking through.

Then, after an eternity of curdling hope…

Dan went to open Herbert's mouth again, a great lungful of air ready, and Herbert sucked in a breath. Dan sat there for a minute, dumbstruck, air expelled thoughtlessly. Herbert gasped again, eyelids moving. Dan, returning from shock, began work again, helping the body breathe. A minute later, Herbert took a deep breath on his own. Five minutes, he opened his eyes.

Viewing the world around him groggily, his eyes settled on Dan's encouraging grin.

"D…Dan…" He muttered, blinking sleepily. Dan would've crushed him in a hug again but, wary of his fragile condition, helped him upright.

"I…schl…thought…I…was dead…" He was having trouble getting the words out, battling a thick tongue and slowed brain activity. Dan patted him on the back, shushing him.

"Don't talk, until you're really better." He told him, a chunk of ceiling falling to the ground punctuating it.

Herbert's tired gaze followed the sounds of struggle, then looked a question at Dan.

"Atwood." He said. "I found your vial."

Herbert's smile had little of his original vigor or wry sense of humor, but it was a smile anyway. Dan pulled him into a cautious hug, mindful of his neck that was already deeply purple with bruising.

The door behind them splintered, Atwood giving a triumphant roar and tossing Ash over his shoulder. Ash-thing thumped bodily against the opposite wall. Dan put an arm under Herbert's shoulders and another under his knees and drag-carried him over to the fireplace. Ash-thing jumped upright and snarled, maggoty hand flopping with fury.

The two rotten titans clashed in the living room, overturning the furniture still left standing, making crunching noises at every impact. The humans huddled in the corner, praying they wouldn't be seen. Dawn would be creeping in soon, but right now Ash-thing had the home advantage. It beat back Atwood's corpse until, after a too-slow counter, it grabbed him by the neck and gave a mighty wrench. The head didn't come off, but Atwood was noticeably slower. The fight raged on, but Atwood had only the blind madness of the reanimated, Ash had eons of fury and darkness and god knows what else fueling his fight.

He battered Atwood until he ceased to fight back, then kept on hitting him. Bones cracked, flesh bruised and then split, Atwood's birthing roar had become a feeble mew. Now the sun sat just below the horizon, as Ash-thing stood surveying its victory. It gave one last bellow, beating its chest like a gorilla, then turned upon the two in the corner. Dan, anticipating this, had armed himself with a poker. He charged at ash and got a face full of boomstick as a result. Ash-thing stood gloating above Dan, hand squirming with an unholy eagerness. Dan, too hurt to even see straight, swung blindly and got lucky. The poker caught Ash's rotten hand and sent it flying into the corner, where it landed with a thud and lay there stunned. Before it could get up again, Herbert attacked it with the fireplace shovel, grimacing at each joint popped. A scream halted his satisfyingly bloody work, and he looked up.

Ash had tired of throwing things around and now just stood still, crushing Dan against his body. Dan, still reeling from earlier, could only choke for Herbert to run. Herbert glanced at the flimsy shovel in his hands and then cast about for anything that might make a better weapon. No good. Everything was smashed, broken, or too far away.

Sunlight hit the far corner of the room, too high to do any good. Ash-thing glanced up at it, then looked back dismissively. It would get another soul before the sun even got its filthy tendrils on the world again.

Herbert was beginning to panic, sifting through the debris on the floor. Nothing sharp enough, hard enough, nothing that could damage that horrific being…his eyes alighted on the fireplace. There was a few burnt pages with some archaic writing smoldering near the embers, and a cheap magnifying glass necklace like you'd win at skeeball. Herbert's breath caught in his chest, his hands shook with adrenaline. Carefully, quickly, he snagged the cheap magnifying glass and grabbed the one unbroken chair, trying to ignore the painful cracking noises behind him. He stood on the chair and held his arm up as if grasping a mighty beacon, the silver dollar-sized glass catching the sun and winking.

Steadying his shaking arm, he angled the glass until a thin stream of sunlight flowed away from the rest and onto the wall. Fumbling a bit, he turned it until it hit Ash's forehead dead-center. The effect was instantaneous. The Ash-thing squalled and clapped its hands to its face, writhing in agony and dropping Dan. Dan hit the floor with a sick thud, whimpering, trying vainly to scoot away from the frenzied deadite. Herbert tried to keep the beam on Ash at all times, easier in theory than in practice. Ash-thing thrashed about like a trout out of water, doing bodily impossible contortions. Suddenly, all was still.

Herbert held the beam still, blood draining from his rapidly tiring arm. Dan, from his bit of shelter behind the overturned coffee table, made a few recovery gasps.

"Did you get him?" he wheezed, clutching his ribs.

Silence.

Herbert's arm was nearly numb now, except for a pins-and-needles prickling that was steadily getting harder to bear. Dan could only gasp from his vantage point on the floor, feebly attempting to stand up.

The seconds ticked by.

Herbert made to lower his arm. "Well I guess that's-" Ash sprang up with a roar, body contorting inhumanly. His howl drowned out the screams of the other two men, which increased as the thing launched itself into the air and floated, twisting. It roared again, and Herbert's arm gave out on him. The magnifying glass hit the floor with a heart-stopping tinkle. He scrabbled madly for it as the thing sneered at them in the maddening voice of the woods made flesh, trying hard not to listen to the words that scorched his ears and made his vision do strange things. Finally, he got a good hold on the chain as the sunlight reached halfway down the wall. Ash-thing was running out of territory. He held it up from where he stood, hitting the beast with its ray once more. The beast snarled once more, rapidly shifting from one end of the room to another. Dan curled up and threw his arms over his head, feebly defending himself from the floating horror.

"_You shall die!_" the thing hissed, renting the air with its cries. "_You shall never leave this valley! You will suffer the eternal–_"

"_**Ash**_!" Dan shouted from the floor. "_Ash! __**I know you're in there!**_"

Herbert, dazed at the turn of events, held the magnifying glass steady. Ash-thing had stopped moving about the room and hung there, face slack, eyes blank. There was a battle being fought in Ash's body, Ash had the home advantage but the woods were older and stronger. It could go either way unless they helped.

"_Ash!_" Herbert called, catching on quickly. "Ash! Remember Linda? Remember what they did to Linda, Ash? They have her and they aren't going to let her go, and they're going to take you the same way they did her unless you fight them off! Do you want her death to have been in vain? Fight, goddman you!"

Everyone was still for a moment. Then, slowly, Ash thing drifted to the floor, milk swirling in his eyes. Herbert sighed and dropped his arm, only to have the necklace knocked from his grasp and rotting fingers dug into his face.

"_Silly mortals._" Ash-thing sniggered, rotten face leering at him. It raised him up–

–only to squeal in pain as a ray of sunlight hit its arm and seared it. Herbert dropped untidily to the floor and Dan scooted over to him, curling around him protectively. Ash-thing backed up, snarling, growling, and other noises no one has made words for because no one hears them and remains sane enough to try. The others quickly clapped their hands to their ears at the onslaught of sound, bracing themselves like men in a storm. What the woods had left in Ash swirled around his body, draining away, leaving only the man behind who dropped to the floor like a stringless marionette. Finally, daylight filled the room.

Herbert peeked from behind his hands. Ash lay in a field of debris, limbs askew, unconscious. Dan coughed beside him and he patted his back absentmindedly. They both gazed at his body for awhile.

"…Do you think he's…_okay_?" Dan whispered, unable to bring what he dreaded into words. Herbert shuddered like he was doused with a glass of cold water and snapped back to attention, fussily straightening himself up.

"Of course he is." Herbert said flatly, standing up and becoming once more the reanimator. "He's merely fatigued from possession, coupled with the injuries sustained in struggle. He's had worse."

_Something was torn from it, it bellowed and rippled as the sun seared off a tentacle…_

Dan struggled to his feet. "I don't see how we can get him out of here. We're both in pretty bad shape ourselves, and he isn't exactly light."

Herbert replied airily, "We'll find a way Daniel."

_Fury boiled up in It, fury for Its loss and the three still living. Light flooded the valley._

They looked around for materials for a makeshift pallet, but there was nothing larger than a chair leg. Even the ratty chair had been destroyed in the onslaught, though it had survived most of the seventies it hadn't lasted ten minutes of the undead.

Dan and Herbert were lifting a chunk of door when a groan startled them. Turning toward their fallen companion, they hefted their makeshift weapons in hand. Long seconds ticked by…

Ash turned over and grinned at them through many cuts and bruises. "Howdy."

Relief flooded through Herbert, and it was all he could do to maintain his composure. He resigned himself to breathing on his glasses and buffing them proudly on his tattered shirt.

"Welcome back."

_It churned and boiled with an untold eon's worth of rage. It had been so close, so close…_

Between the three of them, they managed to heft the debris blocking the front door, shambling out past the wreckage of a lifetime. Dan debated whether to throw a match, burn the place down. In the end, he decided against it. After all, it wasn't such a bad little cabin.

The three men stretched their legs in the warm sunlight just beginning to dapple the forest floor, grinning at each other in triumph.

_It couldn't end this way, it __**wouldn't**__end this way…_

Though the question of transportation was momentarily unanswered, they felt sure that-

Something exploded not to far off. The three flinched and looked around as the trees began writhing excitedly.

"Uh-oh." Ash muttered.

_It reached out just as the last bastion of shadow was disappearing, and __**struck**__…_

"Hey, what are'ya doin' out here?" a tiny wizened little man in a forestry uniform walked around a boulder that had hidden him from view until now. "What are- …holy smokes, look at the _trees_!"

_It roared through the trees, tearing the air apart…_

"Um…we ah, uh…" even Herbert was at a lack for words.

"Say, listen, my pardner went up here a day or two ago, mightn't you've seen him?" He had a loud voice for such a little man.

"We…we really-" the little man flicked out a pistol and aimed dead center on Dan's torso. He gulped audibly.

"Supposin' you start talkin' **boy**," He snarled, eyes warily flicking from him, to Ash, to Herbert, then back to him again.

_Almost there…_

"We don't know anything!" Dan finally shrieked out.

"Don't know nothin', huh?" The little man chuckled contemptuously. "Don't know no-" Suddenly there was empty space where he had been, and a soft red rain pattered all around them.

Herbert, recovering quickly from his shock, jostled the others into motion.

"It's _after_ us!" he shouted. "let's **go**!"

They ran as it collected itself, barely hoping to last ten paces-

And there was the other forester's jeep.

They would've stopped and stared at such a miracle, but Herbert kept at their heels. "Go, _go! __**In!**_" They roused from sleepy shock and dove in, Dan turning the key in the ignition before Ash was even fully in. They peeled out of there, backwards, as the Thing gathered itself again and launched after them, boulders shattering with the force of its passage. Dan gunned it as they broke out of the thicker woods, there was a bridge in sight ahead. Behind, roared death.

"_Faster_!" Herbert cried unnecessarily, because they were going over the hill, there was the bridge, they were just ahead of It, and they were on the bridge and It was right behind…

* * *

_Author's note: sorry for the delay folks, sorry for the delay. Personal crap bloomed up just as I was working on the last few chapters, and I had to take time off to deal with that. Then I just plain forgot. Sorry. Don't worry, I'm not being a bastard, there's an epilogue coming up, I promise. 'Til then…_


	7. Epilogue

**Epilogue**

* * *

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

…of course, the booze helps.

By closing time the three young men had greatly depleted the Red Hook tavern's supply of ale and now wobbled tipsily onto the sidewalk. The tallest, who kept his right hand perpetually hidden, pretended to check a watch.

"Wellllll Herbie, I'd shay we're late for the lasht bus, whaddya shay we shleep dis off at the station, mmm?"

The addressee didn't answer, being sick in the bushes. The third young man steadied him and patted his back, grimacing at the smell. The shorter man lurched up unsteadily, cowlick standing at attention.

"I _hurk_ think we should walk this off first." This speech was delivered with the unsteady rhythm of an inexperienced drinker. His friend patted him on the back one more time and put his arm around his shoulders, bracing him upright.

"I think we should go get you two some water before you dehydrate completely." Dan said, always the designated driver.

The trio set of at a somewhat unsteady and swerving pace, punctuated by small heaving noises from Herbert. Stopping at a drinking fountain, Ash felt nature call and went off into the bushes. Dan helped Herbert to a nearby bench, which he thunked down onto gratefully. He had gone a sickly shade of green, glasses askew, but at the same time still managed to look like a prim little schoolboy. Dan sat down next to him and was immediately used as a pillow. A stream of curses and laughter drifted over from the bushes, Ash was a little _too_ happy to show the shrubbery who was boss in Dan's humble opinion.

Herbert groaned and made a noise that sounded a little like "never _again_". Dan patted his head and made _shush_ing noises. The stingy genius was not at all prone to celebratory drinking, but their new companion had insisted and surprisingly, Herbert had quickly agreed. It might be nice to have another "real" person around, Dan reflected, Herbert seemed less likely to cause chaos when occupied with more earthly matters. Like trying to pee when you were so drunk you couldn't even find your zipper. _That_ was a fun little experience.

Herbert groaned again and sat up stiffly, rearranging his crudely repaired glasses and still leaving them at an odd angle. He glared at Dan with what he must've thought a stern eye and opened his mouth to lecture. Liquid gurgles came out instead, and he clamped his mouth shut in a hurry. After taking a few deep breaths and pressing his stomach with his hands for a moment, he began again.

"Dan…" He trailed off, narrowing his eyes in an attempt to regain his lost train of thought. Something to do with the guy in the bushes…

…oh, yeah.

"Ashhh said…he needs to get back up to Morristown to catch the next Greyhound to Michigan…I told him we could get him there."

It was one of Herbert's trademark "question but not really a question" statements, but Dan could detect a small note of pleading in his tone. The prickly genius had returned, but he had learned the value of Dan's help and wasn't going to forget it in a hurry. A slurred rendition of "The Innkeeper's Daughter" floated over their heads, bringing the situation back to earth once more. Dan felt more than a little indebted to Ash, a ride to the next town was the least they could do.

"Sure." He told him. Herbert blinked owlishly and gave Dan a hug, something he was still unused to. He clipped Dan's lower lip with his glasses and hit his collarbone a little hard, but it was still a hug. Ash shambled out of the bushes and caught sight of the tender moment, giving a wolf whistle. The two young men tore apart from each other in a flash, but Ash still grinned.

"Hmmmaybe I'll come back later." Herbert blushed furiously and punched Ash in the arm, another first. Ash grinned and shook his head.

"So." He said, "Should we head out?

Dan looked at his traveling companions, then at their stolen forestry jeep, then at the rapidly paling sky. It was a long way to civilization.

"Yeah." He said.

* * *

_Author's Note: Yes, that first paragraph was a Lovecraft quote, I couldn't resist. Morristown is the place where they shot __**Evil Dead**__, and Sam Raimi actually did burn down that cabin to keep people from stealing rocks from the fireplace. I'd like to thank this opportunity to thank my fellow authors who gave such awesome reviews, remind me to return the favour sometime. A shout out to Liana the Zombie, who liked my story so much she wrote me, even though she didn't have an account. I think she does now, and if she does I don't know whether to feel proud of her or ashamed of myself. XD It's been great, guys, be seeing you._


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